Subject matter context search engine

ABSTRACT

A search system associates contextual metadata with search terms and/or stored terms to facilitate identification of relevant information. In one implementation, a search term is identified ( 4304 ) from a received search request. The search term is then rewritten ( 4306 ) in standard form and the standard form term is then set ( 4308 ) as the current search parameter. A source database is then searched ( 4310 ) using the current search parameter. If any results are obtained ( 4312 ) these results may be output ( 4320 ) to the user. If no results are obtained, a parent classification of the search term is set ( 4316 ) as the current search parameter and the process is repeated. The invention thereby provides the ease of use of term searching with the comprehensiveness of category searching.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No.10/970,372 entitled “Subject Matter Context Search Engine”, which wasfiled on Oct. 21, 2004, which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patentapplication Ser. No. 10/931,789 entitled “Multi-User Functionality forConverting Data from a First Form to a Second Form”, which was filed onSep. 1, 2004, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,865,358 issued on Jan. 4, 2011, whichis a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/663,339entitled “Normalizing and Classifying Locale-Specific Information”,filed on Sep. 16, 2003, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,225,199 issued May 29, 2007,which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. patent application Ser. No.09/892,204 entitled “Method and Apparatus for Normalizing and ConvertingStructured Content”, filed on Jun. 26, 2001, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,986,104issued Jan. 10, 2006, which claims priority from U.S. ProvisionalApplication Ser. No. 60/214,090 entitled “Business InformationLocalization System”, filed on Jun. 26, 2000, all of which areincorporated herein by reference.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention relates generally to search systems for searchingstored electronic information and, in particular, to such a system thatassociates contextual metadata with search terms and/or stored terms tofacilitate identification of relevant information.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

Search engines are used in a variety of contexts to allow a user of adata terminal, e.g., a computer, PDA or data enabled phone, to searchstored data for items of interest. For example, search engines are usedfor research, for on-line shopping, and for acquiring businessinformation. The case of on-line catalog searching is illustrative.On-line sales are an increasingly important opportunity for manybusinesses. To encourage and accommodate on-line purchasing, somecompanies have devoted considerable resources to developing search toolsthat help customers identify products of interest. This is particularlyimportant for businesses that have an extensive product line, forexample, office supply companies.

One type of search engine is the product category search engine. Toimplement a product category search engine, the available products aregrouped by categories and subcategories. A user can then enter a productcategory term, or select a term from a pull-down window or the like, toaccess a list of available products. These search engines are veryuseful for customers that have considerable experience or expertise bywhich to understand the structure of the product space at interest.However, in many cases, the product category may not be obvious or maynot be the most convenient way to identify a product. For example, acustomer wishing to purchase Post-It notes may not be able to readilyidentify the category in which that product is grouped or may not wantto work through a series of menus to narrow a search down to the desiredproduct.

In addition or as an alternative to product category searching,web-sites often accommodate keyword searching. To execute a keywordsearch, the user enters a term to identify the product-of-interest;often a trademark or portion of a trademark. A conventional searchengine can then access a database to identify hits or, in some cases,near hits. This allows a customer with a particular product in mind toquickly identify the product, even if the customer can not or does notwish to identify the product category for that product.

Unfortunately, keyword searching can result in a failed search, evenwhen products of potential interest are available. For example, acustomer needing to order appointment books may enter the populartrademark “Daytimer.” If Daytimer appointment books are not carried orare not currently available at the site, the search results may indicatethat there is no match, even though other appointment books, e.g.,At-A-Glance brand books, are available. This, of course is a lost salesopportunity for the business.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

It has been recognized that there is a need for search logic thatprovides the ease-of-use of term searching with the comprehensiveness ofcategory searching. Such search logic would be useful for catalogsearching or other data system searching applications. In accordancewith the present invention, a knowledge base is constructed by whichitem descriptor terms and/or potential search terms are associated withcontextual information by which the search logic can associate such aterm including a specific, colloquial or otherwise idiosyncratic term,with a subject matter context, so as to enable a more complete search tobe performed and increase the likelihood of yielding useful results.

In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, a method andapparatus (“utility”) are provided for use in establishing a searchabledata structure where search terms are associated with a subject mattercontext. The searchable data structure may be, for example, a databasesystem or other data storage resident on a particular machine ordistributed across a local or wide area network. The utility involvesproviding a list of potential search terms pertaining a subject matterarea of interest and establishing a classification structure for thesubject matter area of interest. For example, the list of potentialsearch terms may be an existing list that has been developed based onanalysis of the subject matter area or may be developed by a subjectmatter expert or based on monitoring search requests pertaining to thesubject matter of interest. Alternatively, the list may be drawn frommultiple sources, e.g., starting from existing lists and supplemented bymonitoring search requests. It will be appreciated that lists exist inmany contexts such as in connection with pay-per-click search engines.

The classification structure preferably has a hierarchical form definedby classes, each of which includes one or more sub-classes, and so on.The utility further involves associating each of the potential searchterms with the classification structure such that the term is assignedto at least one sub-class and a parent class. For example, suchassociations may be reflected in an XML tag structure or by any othersystem for reflecting such metadata structure. In this manner, searchterms are provided with a subject matter context for facilitatingsearching. Thus, in the Daytimer example noted above, a search queryincluding the term Daytimer may be interpreted so as to provide searchresults related more generally to appointment books. For example, such asearch may be implemented iteratively such that the search system firstseeks results matching “Daytimer” and, if no responsive information isavailable, proceeds to the next rung on the classification system, forexample, “Appointment Books.” Such iterations may be repeated untilresults are obtained or until a predetermined number iterations arecompleted, at which point the system may return an error message such as“no results found.”

In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, similarcontext information may be provided to terms associated with the data tobe searched or source data. The utility generally involves providing alist of source data terms defining a subject matter area of interest andestablishing a classification structure for the source data terms.Again, the classification structure preferably has a hierarchical formincluding classes each of which includes one or more sub-classes, and soon. Each of the source terms is associated with the classificationstructure such that the source term is assigned to at least one of thesub-classes and an associated parent class. In this manner, context isprovided in connection with source data to facilitate searching. Thus,for example, a search query including the term “Appointment Book” mayretrieve source data pertaining to Daytimer products, even though thoseproducts' descriptors may not include the term “Appointment Book.”

In a preferred implementation, a data structure is established such thatboth potential search terms and source data terms are associated with aclassification structure. This allows specific items of source data tobe matched to specific search terms based on a common subject mattercontext despite the lack of overlap between the specific search andsource terms. Thus, for example, a search query including the term“Daytimer” may be associated with a classification “Appointment Books.”Similarly, a data item associated with the trademark “At-A-Glance” maybe associated with the subject matter classification “AppointmentBooks.” Consequently, a search query including the term “Daytimer” mayreturn search results including the “At-A-Glance” products of potentialinterest.

In accordance with a still further aspect of the present invention, autility is provided for searching stored data using contextual metadata.The utility involves establishing a knowledge base for a given subjectmatter area, receiving a search request including a first descriptiveterm, accessing a source data collection using the knowledge base, andresponding to the search request using the responsive information. Theknowledge base defines an association between a term of the searchrequest and an item of source data based on a classification within acontext of the subject matter area. Such a classification may beassociated with the search term and/or a source term. A search requestmay thereby be addressed based on a second matter context even thoughthe search is entered based on specific search terms and the item ofsource data is associated with specific source terms. As will be setforth below, the knowledge base may optionally include additionalinformation related to the subject matter area, such as a system ofrules for standardizing terminology and syntax, i.e., a grammar.

In accordance with a still further aspect of the present invention, adata search is facilitated based on a standardization of terms utilizedto execute the search. It has been recognized that term searches arecomplicated by the fact that searchers may enter terms that aremisspelled, colloquial, or otherwise idiosyncratic. Similarly, sourcedata may include jargon, abbreviations or other matter that complicatesterm matching. Accordingly, term searches can be facilitated bystandardizing one or both of the search terms and source terms. Forexample, a user searching for Post-it notes may enter a colloquial termsuch as “sticky tabs.” This term may be rewritten by a utility accordingto the present invention, as, for example, “adhesive notepad” or someother selected standard term. In addition, the term may be associatedwith a classification as discussed above. Similarly, a sourcecollection, such as a catalog, may include a highly stylized entry for aPost-it note product such as “3-Pk, 3×3 PI notes (pop-up)—Asst'd.” Suchan entry may be rewritten to include standard terminology and syntax. Inrelevant part, the term “PI notes” may be rewritten as “Post-it notes”and may be associated with the classification “adhesive notepad.” Thus,a first order classification of the source term matches the standardizedsearch term, thereby facilitating retrieval of relevant information. Asthis example illustrates, such matching is not limited to matching ofterms rewritten in standardized form or matching of classifications, butmay involve matching a rewritten search term to a classification orvice-versa.

Such searching using a data structure of standardized terms and/orassociated classifications, e.g., a knowledge base, may be used for avariety of contexts. For example, such functionality may facilitatesearching of a web-site, product database or other data of an entity byan outside party. In this regard, it may be useful to associate aproduct or product descriptor with multiple, alternative classificationsto accommodate various types of search strategies that may be employed.Thus, a knowledge base may be constructed such that the classification“pen” or specific pen product records are retrieved in response to asearch query including “writing instruments” and “office gifts.”

As a further example, such functionality may facilitate searching ofmultiple legacy databases, e.g., by an inside or outside party or foradvanced database merging functionality. Oftentimes, an entity may haveinformation related to a particular product, company or other subjectmatter in multiple legacy databases, e.g., a product database and anaccounting database. These databases may employ different conventions,or no taut conventions, regarding linguistics and syntax for identifyingcommon data items. This complicates searching using conventionaldatabase search tools and commands, and can result in incomplete searchresults. In accordance with the present invention, a defined knowledgebase can be used to relate a search term to corresponding information ofmultiple legacy systems, e.g., so that a substantially free form searchquery can retrieve relevant information from the multiple legacy systemdespite differing forms of that information in those legacyenvironments.

In accordance with yet another aspect of the present invention, asearchable data system using contextual metadata is provided. Thesearchable data system includes an input port for receiving a searchrequest including a search term, a first storage structure for storingsearchable data defining a subject matter of the searchable data system,a second storage structure for storing a knowledge base, and logic foridentifying the search term and using the knowledge base to obtainresponsive information. The system further comprises an output port foroutputting the responsive data, e.g., to the user or an associatednetwork node. The knowledge base relates a potential search term to adefined classification structure of the subject matter of the searchabledata system. For example, the classification structure may includeclasses, sub-classes and so on to define the subject matter to a desiredgranularity. The logic then uses the knowledge base to relate the searchterm to a determined classification of the classification structure and,in turn, uses the determined classification to access the first storagestructure to obtain the responsive data.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

For a more complete understanding of the present invention and furtheradvantages thereof, reference is now made to the following detaileddescription taken in conjunction with the drawings, in which:

FIG. 1 is a monitor screen shot illustrating a process for developingreplacement rules in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 2 is a monitor screen shot illustrating a process for developingordering rules in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 3 is a schematic diagram of the NorTran Server components of a SOLxsystem in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 4 is a flowchart providing an overview of SOLx system configurationin accordance with the present invention;

FIGS. 5-10 are demonstrative monitor screen shots illustratingnormalization and translation processes in accordance with the presentinvention;

FIG. 11 is a flowchart of a normalization configuration process inaccordance with the present invention;

FIG. 12 is a flowchart of a translation configuration process inaccordance with the present invention;

FIG. 13 is an illustration of a graphical desktop implementation formonitoring the configuration process in accordance with the presentinvention;

FIG. 14 illustrates various network environment alternatives forimplementation of the present invention;

FIG. 15 illustrates a conventional network/web interface;

FIG. 16 illustrates a network interface for the SOLx system inaccordance with the present invention;

FIG. 17 illustrates a component level structure of the SOLx system inaccordance with the present invention;

FIG. 18 illustrates a component diagram of an N-Gram Analyzer of theSOLx system in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 19 illustrates a taxonomy related to the area of mechanics inaccordance with the present invention;

FIG. 20 is a flowchart illustrating a process for constructing adatabase in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 21 is a flowchart illustrating a process for searching a databasein accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 22 is a schematic diagram of a transformation information sharingsystem in accordance with the present invention;

FIGS. 23-35 are sample user interface screens illustratingtransformation information sharing functionality in accordance with thepresent invention;

FIG. 36 is a flowchart illustrating an information import and testingprocess in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 37 is a schematic diagram of a search system in accordance with thepresent invention operating in the startup mode;

FIG. 38 is a schematic diagram illustrating the mapping of the potentialsearch terms and source terms to a single parse tree in accordance withthe present invention;

FIGS. 39 and 40 illustrate graphical user interfaces for mapping termsto a parse tree in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 41 is a flow chart illustrating a process for mapping terms to aparse tree in accordance with the present invention;

FIG. 42 is a schematic diagram illustrating a search system, inaccordance with the present invention, in a use mode;

FIG. 43 is a flow chart illustrating a process for operating the systemof FIG. 42 in the use mode; and

FIG. 44 is a schematic diagram illustrating use of a knowledge base tosearch multiple legacy systems in accordance with the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

In the following description, the invention is set forth in the contextof a search system involving standardization of source and search terms,and the association of classification information with both source termsand search terms. Specific examples are provided in the environment ofbusiness information, e.g., searching a website or electronic catalogfor products of interest. Although this particular implementation of theinvention and this application environment is useful for illustratingthe various aspects of the invention, it will be appreciated that theinvention is more broadly applicable to a variety of applicationenvironments and searching functions. In particular, various aspects ofthe invention as set forth above may be beneficially used independent ofothers of these aspects and are not limited to combinative uses as setforth in the discussion that follows.

The discussion below begins by describing, at a functional and systemcomponent level, a search system constructed in accordance with thepresent invention. This description is contained in Section I.Thereafter, in Sections II et seq., the underlying framework for termstandardization, classification and transformation is described ingreater detail.

Generally, the search system of the present invention is operable in twomodes; the setup mode and the use mode. In the setup mode, the user,generally a subject matter expert as will be described below, performs anumber of functions including accessing lists of potential search termsand/or source terms, developing a standardized set or set of terms,establishing a classification structure, associating the standardizedterms with the classification structure and selectively transforming(e.g., translating) the terms as necessary.

FIG. 37 is a schematic diagram of a search system 3700, in accordancewith the present invention, operating in the startup mode. Generally,the system 3700 includes a controller 3702 and storage configured tostore a term listing 3704, a parse tree structure 3706 and a set ofstructured standardized terms 3708. Although the system 3700 isillustrated as being implemented on a single platform 3710, it will beappreciated that the functionality of the system 3700 may be distributedover multiple platforms, for example, interconnected by a local or widearea network.

The user 3712 uses the controller 3702 to access a previously developedparse tree structure 3706 or to develop the structure 3706. In thisregard, the parse tree structure 3706 generally defines a number ofclassifications, each generally including one or moresub-classifications that collectively define the subject matter area.Examples will be provided below. The number of layers of classificationsand sub-classifications will generally be determined by the user 3712and is dependent on the nature of the subject matter. In many cases,many such classifications will be available, for example, correspondingto headings and subheadings of a catalog or other pre-existingsubdivisions of a subject matter of interest. In other cases, thesubject matter expert may develop the classifications andsub-classifications based on an analysis of the subject matter.

The user can then use the controller 3702 to access a term listing 3704to be processed. As noted above, such a term listing 3704 may includepotential search terms, source terms from a source data collection orboth. In the case of potential search terms, the terms may be obtainedfrom a pre-existing list or may be developed by the user 3712. Forexample, the potential search terms may be drawn from a storedcollection of search terms entered by users in the context of thesubject matter of interest. Additional sources may be available, in avariety of contexts, for example, lists that have been developed inconnection with administering a pay-per-click search engine. The listmay be updated over time based on monitoring search requests. Similarly,the source term listing may be previously developed or may be developedby the user 3712. For example, in the context of online shoppingapplications, the source listing may be drawn from an electronic productcatalog or other product data base.

After accessing the term listing, the user may perform a number offunctions including standardization and classification. Standardizationrefers to mapping of terms from the term listing 3704 to a second set,generally a smaller set, of standardized terms. In this manner,misspellings, abbreviations, colloquial terms, synonyms, differentlinguistic/syntax conventions of multiple legacy systems and otheridiosyncratic matter can be addressed such that the list of standardizedterms is substantially reduced in relation to the original term listing3704. It will be appreciated from the discussion below that suchstandardization facilitates execution of the searching functionality aswell as transformation functions as may be desired in some contexts,e.g., translation.

The resulting list of standardized terms can then be mapped to the parsetree structure 3706. As will be described below, this can be executedvia a simple drag and drop operation on a graphical user interface.Thus, an item from a source listing, for example, identifying aparticular Post-it note product, may be associated with an appropriatebase level classification, for example, “Adhesive Notepad.” Similarly, aterm from a potential search term listing such as “Sticky Pad” may beassociated with the same base level classification. It will beappreciated that a given term may be associated with more than one baselevel classification, a given base level classification may beassociated with more than one parent classification, etc.

As noted above, such a base level classification may be associated witha parent classification, grandparent classification, etc. All of theserelationships are inherited when the term under consideration isassociated with a base level classification. The result is that thestandardized term is associated with a string of classes and sub-classesof the parse tree structure 3706. For example, these relationships maybe reflected in an XML tag system or other metadata representationassociated with the term. The resulting structured standardized termsare then stored in a storage structure 3708 such as a database.

It will thus be appreciated that, in the illustrated embodiment, bothsource terms and potential search terms may be mapped to elements of thesame parse tree structure. This is shown in FIG. 38. As shown, multipleterms 3802 from the source collection are mapped to the parse treestructure 3800. Similarly, multiple terms from the potential search termlisting 3804 are mapped to corresponding elements of the parse treestructure 3800. In this manner, a particular search term entered by auser can be used to identify responsive information from the sourcecollection based on a common classification or sub-classificationdespite the absence of any overlap between the entered search term andthe corresponding items from the source collection. It will beappreciated that it may be desirable to link a given term 3802 or 3804with more than one classification or classification lineage of the parsetree 3800. This may have particular benefits in connection with matchinga particular product or product category to multiple potential searchstrategies, e.g., mapping “pen” to searches including “writinginstrument” or “office gift.”

An example of this process is shown in FIG. 39 with respect toparticular search terms. In particular, FIG. 39 shows a user interfacerepresenting a portion of a parse tree 3900 for a particular subjectmatter such as the electronic catalog of a office supply warehouse. Inthis case, the user uses the graphical user interface to establish anassociation between search terms 3902 and 3904 and the parse tree 3900.Specifically, search term 3902, in this case “sticky pad” is dragged anddropped on the node 3906 of the parse tree 3900 labeled “Adhesive.” Thisnode 3906 or classification is a sub-classification of “Notepads” 3908which is a sub-classification of “Paper Products” 3910 which, finally,is a sub-classification of “Office_Supplies” 3912. Similarly, term 3904,in this case “Daytimer,” is associated with classification“Appointment_Books which is a sub-classification of “Non-electronic”3916 which, in turn, is a sub-classification of “Organizers” 3918 which,finally, is a sub-classification of “Office_Supplies” 3912. Data strings3920 and 3922 illustrate the resulting structured terms reflecting theclassification relationships (other syntax, such as standard XML tagsyntax, may be used to reflect the classification structure). It will beappreciated that the example of FIG. 39 omits the optional step of termstandardization. That is, the potential search term “Sticky Pad” mayalternatively first be mapped to a standardized term such as “Post-itnote” before being associated with the parse tree. Such standardizationwill be described in more detail below.

FIG. 40 illustrates how the same parse tree 3900 may be used toassociate a classification with items from a source collection. Forexample, such a source collection may be drawn from an electroniccatalog or other database of the business. In this case, the source term4002 denoted “3-pack, 3×3 Post-it notes (Pop-up)-Asst'd” is associatedwith the same node 3906 as “Sticky Pad” was in the previous example.Similarly, term 4004 denoted “2005 Daytimer-Weekly-7×10-Blk” isassociated with the same node 3914 as potential search term “Daytimer”was in the previous example. As will be appreciated from the discussionbelow, such common associations with respect to the parse tree 3900facilitate searching.

This process for establishing a knowledge base may be summarized withrespect to the flow chart of FIG. 41. The illustrated process 4100 isinitiated by developing (4102) a parse tree that defines the subjectmatter of interest in terms of a number of classifications andsub-classifications. As noted above, such parsing of the subject mattermay be implemented with enough levels to divide the subject matter tothe desired granularity. The process 4100 then proceeds on two separatepaths relating to establishing classifications for potential searchterms and classifications for items from the source collection. It willbe appreciated that these two paths may be executed in any order orconcurrently. On the potential search term path, the process involvesobtaining or developing (4104) a potential search term listing. As notedabove, an existing list may be obtained, a new list may be developed bya subject matter expert, or some combination of these processes mayoccur. The terms are then mapped (4106) to the parse tree structure suchas by a drag and drop operation on a graphical user interface asillustrated above. On the source term process line, the process 4100proceeds by obtaining or developing (4108) a source term listing. Again,the source term listing may be obtained from existing sources, developedby subject matter expert or some combination of these processes mayoccur. The individual terms are then mapped (4110) to the parse treestructure, again, for example, by way of a drag and drop operation asillustrated above. Although not shown, the process 4100 may furtherinclude the steps of re-writing the potential search terms and sourceterms in a standardized form.

The search system of the present invention is also operative in a usemode. This is illustrated in FIG. 42. The illustrated system 4200includes input structure 4202 for receiving a search request from a user4204. Depending on the specific network context in which the system 4200is implemented, the search request may be entered directly at themachine executing the search system, or may be entered at a remote nodeinterconnected to the platform 4206 via a local or wide area network.The nature of the input structure 4202 may vary accordingly. The searchrequest is processed by a controller 4208 to obtain responsiveinformation that is transmitted to the user 4204 via output structure4210. Again, the nature of the output structure 4210 may vary dependingon the specific network implementation.

In the illustrated implementation, in order to obtain the responsiveinformation, the controller accesses the knowledge base 4212. Theknowledge base 4212 includes stored information sufficient to identify aterm from the search request, rewrite the term in a standardized form,transform the term if necessary, and obtain the metadata associated withthe term that reflects the classification relationships of the term. Thecontroller then uses the standardized term together with theclassification information to access responsive information from thesource data 4214.

FIG. 4300 is a flow chart illustrating a corresponding process 4300. Theprocess 4300 is initiated by receiving (4302) a search request, forexample, from a keyboard, graphical user interface or network port. Thesystem is then operative to identify (4304) a search term from thesearch request. In this regard, any appropriate search query syntax maybe supported. For example, a search term may be entered via a templateincluding predefined Boolean operators or may be entered freeform.Existing technologies allow for identification of search terms thusentered.

The search term is then rewritten (4306) in standard form. This mayinvolve correcting misspellings, mapping multiple synonyms to a selectedstandard term, implementing a predetermined syntax and grammar, etc., aswill be described in more detail below. The resulting standard form termis then set (4308) as the current search parameter.

In the illustrated implementation, the search then proceeds iterativelythrough the hierarchy of the parse tree structure. Specifically, this isinitiated by searching (4310) the source database using the currentsearch parameter. If any results are obtained (4312) these results maybe output (4320) to the user. If no results are obtained, the parentclassification at the next level of the parse tree is identified (4314).That parent classification is then set (4316) as the current searchparameter and the process is repeated. Optionally, the user may bequeried (4318) regarding such a classification search. For example, theuser may be prompted to answer a question such as “no match found—wouldyou like to search for other products in the same classification?” Inaddition, the logic executed by the process controller may limit suchsearches to certain levels of the parse tree structure, e.g., no morethan three parse levels (parent, grandparent, great grandparent) inorder to avoid returning undesired results. Alternatively oradditionally, such searching may be limited to a particular number ofresponsive items. The responsive items as presented to the user may beordered or otherwise prioritized based on relevancy as determined inrelation to proximity to the search term in the parse tree structure.

It will be appreciated that searching functionalities such as discussedabove is not limited to searching of a web-site or electronic catalog byoutside parties but is more generally useful in a variety of searchingand database merging environments. FIG. 44 illustrates a system 4400 forusing a knowledge base 4404 to access information from multiple legacydatabases 4401-4403. Many organizations have related information storedin a variety of legacy databases, for example, product databases andaccounting databases. Those legacy databases may have been developed orpopulated by different individuals or otherwise include differentconventions relating to linguistics and syntax.

In the illustrated example, a first record 4406 of a first legacydatabase 4401 reflects a particular convention for identifying amanufacturer (“Acme”) and product (“300W AC Elec.Motor . . . ”). Record4407 associated with another legacy database 4403 reflects a differentconvention including, among other things, a different identification ofthe manufacturer (“AcmeCorp”) and a misspelling (“Moter”).

In this case, an internal or external user can use the processor 4405 toenter a substantially freeform search request, in this case “Acme Inc.Power Equipment.” For example, such a search request may be entered inthe hopes of retrieving all relevant information from all of the legacydatabases 4401-4403. This is accommodated, in the illustratedembodiment, by processing the search request using the knowledge base4404. The knowledge base 4404 executes functionality as discussed aboveand in more detail below relating to standardizing terms, associatingterms with a classification structure and the like. Thus, the knowledgebase 4404 may first process the search query to standardize and/orclassify the search terms. For example, Acme, Inc. may be associatedwith the standardized term “Acme.” The term polar equipment may beassociated with the standardized term or classification “motor.” Each ofthese terms/classifications may in turn be associated with associatedlegacy forms of the databases 4401-4403 to retrieve responsiveinformation from each of the databases. Additional conventionalfunctionality such as merge functionality may be implemented to identifyand prioritize the responsive information provided as search results tothe processor 4405. In this manner, searching or merging of legacy datasystems is accommodated with minimal additional code.

From the discussion above, it will be appreciated that substantialeffort is involved in transforming data from one form to another, e.g.,from a raw list of potential search or source terms to a set or sets ofstandardized, classified and, perhaps, translated terms. The presentinvention also accommodates sharing information established indeveloping a transformation model such as a semantic metadata model(SMM) used in this regard. Such sharing of information allows multipleusers to be involved in creating the knowledge base, e.g., at the sametime, and allows components of such information to be utilized instarting new knowledge base creation projects.

The invention is preferably implemented in connection with acomputer-based tool for facilitating substantially real-timetransformation of electronic communications. As noted above, theinvention is useful in a variety of contexts, including transformationof business as well as non-business content and also includingtransformation of content across language boundaries as well as within asingle language environment.

It will be appreciated that transformation of data in accordance withthe present invention is not limited to searching applications asdescribed above, but is useful in a variety of applications includingtranslation assistance. In the following description, such a system isdescribed in connection with the transformation of business content froma source language to a target language using a Structured ObjectLocalization expert (SOLx) system. The invention is further described inconnection with classification of terminology for enhanced processing ofelectronic communications in a business or non-business context. Theinformation sharing functionality and structure of the invention is thendescribed. Such applications serve to fully illustrate various aspectsof the invention. It will be appreciated, however, that the invention isnot limited to such applications.

In addition, in order to facilitate a more complete understanding of thepresent invention and its advantages over conventional machinetranslation systems, the following description includes considerablediscussion of grammar rules and other linguistic formalities. It shallbe appreciated that, to a significant degree, these formalities aredeveloped and implemented with the assistance of the SOLx system.Indeed, a primary advantage of the SOLx system is that it is intendedfor use by subject matter experts, not linguistic experts. Moreover, theSOLx system can handle source data in its native form and does notrequire substantial database revision within the source system. The SOLxsystem thereby converts many service industry transformation tasks intotools that can be addressed by in-house personnel or substantiallyautomatically by the SOLx system.

The following description is generally divided into two sections. In thefirst section, certain subjects relevant to the configuration of SOLxare described. This includes a discussion of configuration objectives aswell as the normalization classification and translation processes.Then, the structure of SOLx is described, including a discussion ofnetwork environment alternatives as well as the components involved inconfiguration and run-time operation. In the second section, theinformation sharing functionality and structure is described. Thisincludes a discussion of the creation, editing and extension of datadomains, as well as domain management and multi-user functionality.

II. Transformation Configuration

As noted above, the information sharing technology of the presentinvention is preferably implemented in connection with a machine basedtool that is configured or trained by one or more SMEs who develop aknowledge base including an SMM. This machine based tool is firstdescribed in this Section I. The knowledge sharing functionality andstructure is described in Section II that follows.

A. System Configuration

1. Introduction—Configuration Challenges

The present invention addresses various shortcomings of conventionaldata transformation, including manual translation and conventionalmachine translation, especially in the context of handling businesscontent. In the former regard, the present invention is largelyautomated and is scalable to meet the needs of a broad variety ofapplications.

In the latter regard, there are a number of problems associated withtypical business content that interfere with good functioning of aconventional machine translation system. These include out-of-vocabulary(OOV) words that are not really OOV and covert phrase boundaries. When aword to be translated is not in the machine translation system'sdictionary, that word is said to be OOV. Often, words that actually arein the dictionary in some form are not translated because they are notin the dictionary in the same form in which they appear in the dataunder consideration. For example, particular data may contain manyinstances of the string “PRNTD CRCT BRD”, and the dictionary may containthe entry “PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD,” but since the machine translationsystem cannot recognize that “PRNTD CRCT BRD” is a form of “PRINTEDCIRCUIT BOARD” (even though this may be apparent to a human), themachine translation system fails to translate the term “PRNTD CRCT BRD”.The SOLx tool set of the present invention helps turn these “false OOV”terms into terms that the machine translation system can recognize.

Conventional language processing systems also have trouble telling whichwords in a string of words are more closely connected than other sets ofwords. For example, humans reading a string of words like Acetic AcidGlass Bottle may have no trouble telling that there's no such thing as“acid glass,” or that the word Glass goes together with the word Bottleand describes the material from which the bottle is made. Languageprocessing systems typically have difficulty finding just such groupingsof words within a string of words. For example, a language processingsystem may analyze the string Acetic Acid Glass Bottle as follows:

-   -   i) Acetic and Acid go together to form a phrase    -   ii) Acetic Acid and Glass go together to form a phrase    -   iii) Acetic Acid Glass and Bottle go together to form a phrase

The first item of the analysis is correct, but the remaining two arenot, and they can lead to an incorrect analysis of the item descriptionas a whole. This faulty analysis may lead to an incorrect translation.The actual boundaries between phrases in data are known as phraseboundaries. Phrase boundaries are often covert—that is, not visiblymarked. The SOLx tool of the present invention, as described in detailbelow, prepares data for translation by finding and marking phraseboundaries in the data. For example, it marks phrase boundaries in thestring Acetic Acid Glass Bottle as follows:

-   -   Acetic Acid|Glass Bottle        This simple processing step—simple for a human, difficult for a        language processing system—helps the machine translation system        deduce the correct subgroupings of words within the input data,        and allows it to produce the proper translation.

The present invention is based, in part, on the recognition that somecontent, including business content, often is not easily searchable oranalyzable unless a schema is constructed to represent the content.There are a number of issues that a computational system must address todo this correctly. These include: deducing the “core” item; finding theattributes of the item; and finding the values of those attributes. Asnoted above, conventional language processing systems have troubletelling which words in a string of words are more closely connected thanother sets of words. They also have difficulty determining which word orwords in the string represent the “core,” or most central, concept inthe string. For example, humans reading a string of words like AceticAcid Glass Bottle in a catalogue of laboratory supplies may have notrouble telling that the item that is being sold is acetic acid, andthat Glass Bottle just describes the container in which it is packaged.For conventional language processing systems, this is not a simple task.As noted above, a conventional language processing system may identify anumber of possible word groupings, some of which are incorrect. Such alanguage processing system may deduce, for example, that the item thatis being sold is a bottle, and that the bottle is made of “acetic acidglass.” Obviously, this analysis leads to a faulty representation ofbottles (and of acetic acid) in a schema and, therefore, is of littleassistance in building an electronic catalogue system.

In addition to finding the “core” of an item description, it is alsouseful to find the groups of words that describe that item. In thefollowing description, the terms by which an item can be described aretermed its attributes, and the contents or quantity of an attribute istermed its value. Finding attributes and their values is as difficultfor a language processing system as is finding the “core” of an itemdescription. For instance, in the string Acetic Acid Glass Bottle, oneattribute of the core item is the package in which it is distributed.The value of this attribute is Glass Bottle. It may also be deemed thatone attribute of the core item is the kind of container in which it isdistributed. The value of this attribute would be Bottle. One canreadily imagine other container types, such as Drum, Bucket, etc., inwhich acetic acid could be distributed. It happens that the kind ofcontainer attribute itself has an attribute that describes the materialthat the container is made of. The value of this attribute is Glass.Conventional natural language processing systems have troubledetermining these sorts of relationships. Continuing with the exampleabove, a conventional language processing system may analyze the stringAcetic Acid Glass Bottle as follows:

-   -   Acetic and Acid go together to describe Glass    -   Acetic Acid and Glass go together to describe Bottle        This language processing system correctly deduced that Acetic        and Acid go together. It incorrectly concluded that Acetic Acid        go together to form the value of some attribute that describes a        kind of Glass, and also incorrectly concluded that Acetic Acid        Glass go together to give the value of some attribute that        describes the bottle in question.

The SOLx system of the present invention, as described in detail below,allows a user to provide guidance to its own natural language processingsystem in deducing which sets of words go together to describe values.It also adds one very important functionality that conventional naturallanguage processing systems cannot perform without human guidance. TheSOLx system allows you to guide it to match values with specificattribute types. The combination of (1) finding core items, and (2)finding attributes and their values, allows the SOLx system to builduseful schemas. As discussed above, covert phrase boundaries interferewith good translation. Schema deduction contributes to preparation ofdata for machine translation in a very straightforward way: the labelsthat are inserted at the boundaries between attributes corresponddirectly to phrase boundaries. In addition to identifying core items andattributes, it is useful to classify an item. In the example above,either or both of the core item (acetic acid) and its attributes (glass,bottle and glass bottle) may be associated with classifications.Conveniently, this may be performed after phrase boundaries have beeninserted and core items and attributes have been defined. For example,acetic acid may be identified by a taxonomy where acetic acid belongs tothe class aqueous solutions, which belongs to the class industrialchemicals and so on. Glass bottle may be identified by a taxonomy whereglass bottle (as well as bucket, drum, etc.) belong to the familyaqueous solution containers, which in turn belongs to the familypackaging and so on. These relationships may be incorporated into thestructure of a schema, e.g., in the form of grandparent, parent,sibling, child, grandchild, etc. tags in the case of a hierarchicaltaxonomy. Such classifications may assist in translation, e.g., byresolving ambiguities, and allow for additional functionality, e.g.,improve searching for related items.

The next section describes a number of objectives of the SOLx systemconfiguration process. All of these objectives relate to manipulatingdata from its native from to a form more amenable for translation orother localization, i.e., performing an initial transformation to anintermediate form.

2. Configuration Objectives

Based on the foregoing, it will be appreciated that the SOLxconfiguration process has a number of objectives, including solving OOVsand solving covert phrase boundaries based on identification of coreitems, attribute/value pairs and classification. Additional objectives,as discussed below, relate to taking advantage of reusable contentchunks and resolving ambiguities. Many of these objectives are addressedautomatically, or are partially automated, by the various SOLx toolsdescribed below. The following discussion will facilitate a morecomplete understanding of the internal functionality of these tools asdescribed below.

False OOV words and true OOV words can be discovered at two stages inthe translation process: before translation, and after translation.Potential OOV words can be found before translation through use of aCandidate Search Engine as described in detail below. OOV words can beidentified after translation through analysis of the translated output.If a word appears in data under analysis in more than one form, theCandidate Search Engine considers the possibility that only one of thoseforms exists in the machine translation system's dictionary.Specifically, the Candidate Search Engine offers two ways to find wordsthat appear in more than one form prior to submitting data fortranslation: the full/abbreviated search option; and the case variantsearch option. Once words have been identified that appear in more thanone form, a SOLx operator can force them to appear in just one formthrough the use of vocabulary adjustment rules.

In this regard, the full/abbreviated search may output pairs ofabbreviations and words. Each pair represents a potential false OOV termwhere it is likely that the unabbreviated form is in-vocabulary.Alternatively, the full/abbreviated search may output both pairs ofwords and unpaired abbreviations. In this case, abbreviations that areoutput paired with an unabbreviated word are potentially false OOVwords, where the full form is likely in-vocabulary. Abbreviations thatare output without a corresponding full form may be true OOV words. Themachine translation dictionary may therefore be consulted to see if itincludes such abbreviations. Similarly, some entries in a machinetranslation dictionary may be case sensitive. To address this issue, theSOLx system may implement a case variant search that outputs pairs,triplets, etc. of forms that are composed of the same letters, butappear with different variations of case. The documentation for a givenmachine translation system can then be consulted to learn which casevariant is most likely to be in-vocabulary. To determine if a word isfalsely OOV, words that are suspected to be OOV can be compared with theset of words in the machine translation dictionary. There are threesteps to this procedure: 1) for each word that you suspect is falselyOOV, prepare a list of other forms that that word could take; 2) checkthe dictionary to see if it contains the suspected false OOV form; 3)check the dictionary to see if it contains one of the other forms of theword that you have identified. If the dictionary does not contain thesuspected false OOV word and does contain one of the other forms of theword, then that word is falsely OOV and the SOLx operator can force itto appear in the “in-vocabulary” form in the input data as discussedbelow. Generally, this is accomplished through the use of a vocabularyadjustment rule. The vocabulary adjustment rule converts the false OOVform to the in-vocabulary form. The process for writing such rules isdiscussed in detail below.

Problems related to covert phrase boundaries appear as problems oftranslation. Thus, a problem related to covert phrase boundaries mayinitially be recognized when a translator/translation evaluator findsrelated errors in the translated text. A useful objective, then, is toidentify these problems as problems related to covert phrase boundaries,rather than as problems with other sources. For example, a translationevaluator may describe problems related to covert phrase boundaries asproblems related to some word or words modifying the wrong word orwords. Problems related to potential covert phrase boundaries can alsobe identified via statistical analysis. As discussed below, the SOLxsystem includes a statistical tool called the N-gram analyzer (NGA) thatanalyzes databases to determine, among other things, what terms appearmost commonly and which terms appear in proximity to one another. Amistranslated phrase identified in the quality control analysis(described below in relation to the TQE module) which has a low NGAprobability for the transition between two or more pairs of wordssuggests a covert phrase boundary. Problems related to covert phraseboundaries can also be addressed through modifying a schematicrepresentation of the data under analysis. In this regard, if a covertphrase boundary problem is identified, it is often a result of attributerules that failed to identify an attribute. This can be resolved bymodifying the schema to include an appropriate attribute rule. If aschema has not yet been produced for the data, a schema can beconstructed at this time. Once a categorization or attribute rule hasbeen constructed for a phrase that the translator/translation evaluatorhas identified as poorly translated, then the original text can bere-translated. If the result is a well-translated phrase, the problemhas been identified as one of a covert phrase boundary and the operatormay consider constructing more labeling rules for the data underanalysis. Covert phrase boundary problems can be addressed by building aschema, and then running the schematized data through a SOLx processthat inserts a phrase boundary at the location of every labeling/taggingrule.

The core item of a typical business content description is the item thatis being sold/described. An item description often consists of its coreitem and some terms that describe its various attributes. For example,in the item description Black and Decker ⅜″ drill with accessories, theitem that is being described is a drill. The words or phrases Black andDecker, ⅜″, and with accessories all give us additional informationabout the core item, but do not represent the core item itself. The coreitem in an item description can generally be found by answering thequestion, what is the item that is being sold or described here? Forexample, in the item description Black and Decker ⅜″ drill withaccessories, the item that is being described is a drill. The words orphrases Black and Decker, ⅜″, and with accessories all indicatesomething about the core item, but do not represent the core itemitself.

A subject matter expert (SME) configuring SOLx for a particularapplication can leverage his domain-specific knowledge by listing theattributes of core items before beginning work with SOLx, and by listingthe values of attributes before beginning work with SOLx. Bothclassification rules and attribute rules can then be prepared beforemanipulating data with the SOLx system. Domain-specific knowledge canalso be leveraged by recognizing core items and attributes and theirvalues during configuration of the SOLx system and writing rules forthem as they appear. As the SME works with the data within the SOLxsystem, he can write rules for the data as the need appears. TheCandidate Search Engine can also be used to perform a collocation searchthat outputs pairs of words that form collocations. If one of thosewords represents a core item, then the other word may represent anattribute, a value, or (in some sense) both. Attribute-value pairs canalso be identified based on a semantic category search implemented bythe SOLx system. The semantic category search outputs groups of itemdescriptions that share words belonging to a specific semantic category.Words from a specific semantic category that appear in similar itemdescriptions may represent a value, an attribute, or (in some sense)both.

Business content is generally characterized by a high degree ofstructure that facilitates writing phrasing rules and allows forefficient reuse of content “chunks.” As discussed above, much contentrelating to product descriptions and other structured content is notfree-flowing sentences, but is an abbreviated structure called a ‘nounphrase’. Noun phrases are typically composed of mixtures of nouns (N),adjectives (A), and occasionally prepositions (P). The mixtures of nounsand adjectives may be nested. The following are some simple examples:

TABLE 1 A N Ceramic insulator N N Distribution panel A A N Largemetallic object A N N Variable speed drill N A N Plastic coated plate NN N Nine pin connector N P N Angle of entry

Adjective phrases also exist mixed with adverbs (Av). Table 2 lists someexamples.

TABLE 2 Av A Manually operable N A Color coded N N A Carbon fiberreinforcedThe noun phrase four-strand color-coded twisted-pair telephone wire hasthe pattern NNNAANNN. It is grouped as (four_(N) strand_(N))_(N)(color_(N) coded_(A))_(A) (twisted_(A) pair_(N))_(N) telephone_(N)wire_(N). Another way to look at this item is an object-attribute list.The primary word or object is wire; of use type telephone; strand typetwisted-pair; color property color-coded, and strand number type isfour-stranded. The structure is N₁AN₂N₃N₄. With this type of compoundgrouping, each group is essentially independent of any other group.Hence, the translation within each group is performed as an independentphrase and then linked by relatively simple linguistic rules.

For example, regroup N₁AN₂N₃N₄ as NN₃N₄ where N=N₁AN₂. In Spanish thiscan be translated as NN₃N₄→N₄ ‘de’ N₃ ‘de’ {N} where {N} means thetranslated version of N, and → means translated as. In Spanish, it wouldbe N₁AN₂→N₂A ‘de’ N₁. The phrase then translates as N₁AN₂N₃N₄→N₄ ‘de’ N₃‘de’ N₂A ‘de’ N₁.

In addition to defining simple rule sets for associating translatedcomponents of noun phrases, there is another factor that leads to thefeasibility of automatically translating large component databases. Thisadditional observation is that very few terms are used in creating thesedatabases. For example, databases have been analyzed that have 70,000part descriptions, yet are made up of only 4,000 words or tokens.Further, individual phrases are used hundreds of times. In other words,if the individual component pieces or “chunks” are translated, and thereare simple rules for relating theses chunks, then the translation oflarge parts of the content, in principle, is straightforward. The SOLxsystem includes tools as discussed in more detail below for identifyingreusable chunks, developing rules for translation and storing translatedterms/chunks for facilitating substantially real-time transformation ofelectronic content.

Another objective of the configuration process is enabling SOLx toresolve certain ambiguities. Ambiguity exists when a language processingsystem does not know which of two or more possible analyses of a textstring is the correct one. There are two kinds of ambiguity in itemdescriptions: lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity. When properlyconfigured, the SOLx system can often resolve both kinds of ambiguity.

Lexical ambiguity occurs when a language processing system does not knowwhich of two or more meanings to assign to a word. For example, theabbreviation mil can have many meanings, including million, millimeter,military, and Milwaukee. In a million-item database of tools andconstruction materials, it may occur with all four meanings. Intranslation, lexical ambiguity leads to the problem of the wrong wordbeing used to translate a word in your input. To translate yourmaterial, it is useful to expand the abbreviation to each of itsdifferent full forms in the appropriate contexts. The user can enablethe SOLx system to do this by writing labeling rules that distinguishthe different contexts from each other. For example, mil might appearwith the meaning million in the context of a weight, with the meaningmillimeter in the context of a length, with the meaning military in thecontext of a specification type (as in the phrase MIL SPEC), and withthe meaning Milwaukee in the context of brand of a tool. You then writevocabulary adjustment rules to convert the string mil into theappropriate full form in each individual context. In schematization,resolving lexical ambiguity involves a number of issues, includingidentification of the core item in an item description; identificationof values for attributes; and assignment of values to proper attributes.

Lexical ambiguity may also be resolved by reference to an associatedclassification. The classification may be specific to the ambiguous termor a related term, e.g., another term in the same noun phrase. Thus, forexample, the ambiguous abbreviation “mil” may be resolved by 1) notingthat it forms an attribute of an object-attribute list, 2) identifyingthe associated object (e.g., drill), 3) identifying a classification ofthe object (e.g., power tool), and 4) applying a rule set for thatclassification to select a meaning for the term (e.g., mil—Milwaukee).These relationships may be defined by the schema.

Structural ambiguity occurs when a language processing system does notknow which of two or more labeling rules to use to group together setsof words within an item description. This most commonly affectsattribute rules and may require further nesting of parent/child tagrelationships for proper resolution. Again, a related classification mayassist in resolving structural ambiguity.

3. Configuration Processes

a. Normalization

As the foregoing discussion suggests, the various configurationobjectives (e.g., resolving false OOVs, identifying covert phraseboundaries, taking advantage of reusable chunks and resolvingambiguities) can be addressed in accordance with the present inventionby transforming input data from its native form into an intermediateform that is more amenable to translation or otherlocalization/transformation. The corresponding process, which is aprimary purpose of SOLx system configuration, is termed “normalization.”Once normalized, the data will include standardized terminology in placeof idiosyncratic terms, will reflect various grammar and other rulesthat assist in further processing, and will include tags that providecontext including classification information for resolving ambiguitiesand otherwise promoting proper transformation. The associated processesare executed using the Normalization Workbench of the SOLx system, aswill be described below. There are two kinds of rules developed usingthe Normalization Workbench: grammatical rules, and normalization rules.The purpose of a grammatical rule is to group together and label asection of text. The purpose of a normalization rule is to cause alabeled section of text to undergo some change. Although these rules arediscussed in detail below in order to provide a more completeunderstanding of the present invention, it will be appreciated thatthese rules are, to a large extent, developed and implemented internallyby the various SOLx tools. Accordingly, SOLx operators need not havelinguistics expertise to realize the associated advantages.

i) Normalization Rules

The Normalization Workbench offers a number of different kinds ofnormalization rules relating to terminology including: replacementrules, joining rules, and ordering rules. Replacement rules allow thereplacement of one kind of text with another kind of text. Differentkinds of replacement rules allow the user to control the level ofspecificity of these replacements. Joining rules allow the user tospecify how separated elements should be joined together in the finaloutput. Ordering rules allow the user to specify how different parts ofa description should be ordered relative to each other.

With regard to replacement rules, data might contain instances of theword centimeter written four different ways—as cm, as cm., as c.m., andas centimeter—and the user might want to ensure that it always appearsas centimeter. The Normalization Workbench implements two differentkinds of replacement rules: unguided replacement, and guidedreplacement. The rule type that is most easily applicable to aparticular environment can be selected. Unguided replacement rules allowthe user to name a tag/category type, and specify a text string to beused to replace any text that is under that tag. Guided replacementrules allow the user to name a tag/category type, and specify specifictext strings to be used to replace specific text strings that are underthat tag. Within the Normalization Workbench logic, the format ofunguided replacement rules may be, for example:

[category_type]=>‘what to replace its text with’

For instance, the following rule says to find any [foot] category label,and replace the text that it tags with the word feet:

[foot]=>‘feet’

If that rule was run against the following input,

Steel piping 6 [foot] foot long

Steel piping 3 [foot] feet long

it would produce the following output:

Steel piping 6 [foot] feet long

Steel piping 3 [foot] feet long

The second line is unchanged; in the first line, foot has been changedto feet.

Guided replacement rules allow the user to name a tag/category type, andspecify specific text strings to be used to replace specific textstrings that are under that tag. This is done by listing a set ofpossible content strings in which the normalization engine should “lookup” the appropriate replacement. The format of these rules is:

[category_type] :: lookup  ‘text to replace’ => ‘text to replace itwith’  ‘other text to replace’ => ‘text to replace it with’  ‘more textto replace’ => ‘text to replace it with’ end lookupFor instance, the following rule says to find any [length_metric] label.If you see mm, mm., m.m., or m. m. beneath it, then replace it withmillimeter. If you see cm, cm., c.m., or c. m. beneath it, then replaceit with centimeter:

[length_metric] :: lookup   ‘mm’ => ‘millimeter’   ‘mm.’ => ‘millimeter’  ‘m.m.’ => ‘millimeter’   ‘m. m.’ => ‘millimeter’   ‘cm’ =>‘centimeter’   ‘cm.’ => ‘centimeter’  ‘c.m.’ => ‘centimeter’   ‘c. m.’=> ‘centimeter’ end lookupIf that rule was run against the following input

Stainless steel scalpel handle, [length_metric] ( 5 mm ) [length_metric]( 5 mm ) disposable plastic scalpel handleit would produce the following output:

Stainless steel scalpel handle, [length_metric] ( 5 millimeter )[length_metric] ( 5 millimeter ) disposable plastic scalpel handle

From the user's perspective, such replacement rules may be implementedvia a simple user interface such as shown in FIG. 1. FIG. 1 shows a userinterface screen 100 including a left pane 102 and a right pane 104. Theleft pane 102 displays the grammar rules that are currently in use. Therules are shown graphically, including alternative expressions (in thiscase) as well as rule relationships and categories. Many alternativeexpressions or candidates therefor are automatically recognized by theworkbench and presented to the user. The right pane 104 reflects theprocess to update or add a text replacement rule. In operation, agrammar rule is selected in the left pane 102. All text that can berecognized by the rule appears in the left column of the table 106 inthe right pane 104. The SME then has the option to unconditionallyreplace all text with the string from the right column of the table 106or may conditionally enter a replacement string. Although not shown ineach case below, similar interfaces allow for easy development andimplementation of the various rules discussed herein. It will beappreciated that “liter” and “ounce” together with their variants thusare members of the class “volume” and the left pane 102 graphicallydepicts a portion of a taxonomy associated with a schema.

Joining rules allow the user to specify how separated elements should bejoined together in the final output. Joining rules can be used tore-join elements that were separated during the process of assigningcategory labels. The user can also use joining rules to combine separateelements to form single delimited fields.

Some elements that were originally adjacent in the input may have becomeseparated in the process of assigning them category labels, and it maybe desired to re-join them in the output. For example, the catheter tipconfiguration JL4 will appear as [catheter_tip_configuration] (J L 4)after its category label is assigned. However, the customary way towrite this configuration is with all three of its elements adjacent toeach other. Joining rules allow the user to join them together again.

The user may wish the members of a particular category to form a single,delimited field. For instance, you might want the contents of thecategory label [litter_box] (plastic hi-impact scratch-resistant) toappear as plastic,hi-impact,scratch-resistant in order to conserve spacein your data description field. Joining rules allow the user to jointhese elements together and to specify that a comma be used as thedelimiting symbol.

The format of these rules is:

[category_label]::join with ‘delimiter’

The delimiter can be absent, in which case the elements are joinedimmediately adjacent to each other. For example, numbers emerge from thecategory labeler with spaces between them, so that the number twelvelooks like this:

[real] (1 2)

A standard normalization rule file supplied with the NormalizationWorkbench contains the following joining rule:

[real]::join with ‘,’

This rule causes the numbers to be joined to each other without anintervening space, producing the following output:

[real] (12)

The following rule states that any content that appears with thecategory label [litter_box] should be joined together with commas:

[litter_box]::join with ‘,’

If that rule was run against the following input,

[litter_box] ( plastic hi-impact dog-repellant ) [litter_box] ( enamelshatter-resistant )it would produce the following output:

 [litter_box] ( plastic,hi-impact,dog-repellant ) [litter_box] (enamel,shatter-resistant )

Ordering rules allow the user to specify how different parts of adescription should be ordered relative to each other. For instance,input data might contain catheter descriptions that always contain acatheter size and a catheter type, but in varying orders—sometimes withthe catheter size before the catheter type, and sometimes with thecatheter type before the catheter size:

[catheter] ( [catheter_size] ( 8Fr ) [catheter_type] ( JL4 ) [item] (catheter ) ) [catheter] ( [catheter_type] ( JL5 ) [catheter_size] ( 8Fr) [item] ( catheter ) )The user might prefer that these always occur in a consistent order,with the catheter size coming first and the catheter type coming second.Ordering rules allow you to enforce this ordering consistently.

The internal format of ordering rules is generally somewhat morecomplicated than that of the other types of rules. Ordering rulesgenerally have three parts. Beginning with a simple example:

[catheter]/[catheter_type] [catheter_size]=>($2 $1)

The first part of the rule, shown in bold below, specifies that thisrule should only be applied to the contents of a [catheter] categorylabel:

[catheter]/[catheter_type] [catheter_size]=>($2 $1)

The second part of the rule, shown in bold below, specifies whichlabeled elements are to have their orders changed:

[catheter]/[catheter_type] [catheter_size]=>($2 $1)

Each of those elements is assigned a number, which is written in theformat $number in the third part of the rule. The third part of therule, shown in bold below, specifies the order in which those elementsshould appear in the output:

[catheter]/[catheter_type] [catheter_size]=>($2 $1)

The order $2 $1 indicates that the element which was originally second(i.e., $2) should be first (since it appears in the leftmost position inthe third part of the rule), while the element which was originallyfirst (i.e., $1) should be second (since it appears in the secondposition from the left in the third part of the rule). Ordering rulescan appear with any number of elements. For example, this rule refers toa category label that contains four elements. The rule switches theposition of the first and third elements of its input, while keeping itssecond and fourth elements in their original positions:

[resistor]/[resistance] [tolerance] [wattage] [manufacturer]=>($3 $2 $1$4)

FIG. 2 shows an example of a user interface screen 200 that may be usedto develop and implement an ordering rule. The screen 200 includes aleft pane 202 and a right pane 204. The left pane 202 displays thegrammar rules that are currently in use—in this case, ordering rules forcontainer size—as well as various structural productions under eachrule. The right pane 204 reflects the process to update or addstructural reorganization to the rule. In operation, a structural ruleis selected using the left pane 202. The right pane 204 can then be usedto develop or modify the rule. In this case, the elements or “nodes” canbe reordered by simple drag-and-drop process. Nodes may also be added ordeleted using simple mouse or keypad commands.

Ordering rules are very powerful, and have other uses besidesorder-changing per se. Other uses for ordering rules include thedeletion of unwanted material, and the addition of desired material.

To use an ordering rule to delete material, the undesired material canbe omitted from the third part of the rule. For example, the followingrule causes the deletion of the second element from the productdescription:

[notebook]/[item] [academic_field] [purpose]=>($1 $3)

If that rule was run against the following input,

[notebook] ( [item] ( notebook ) [academic_field] (linguistics)[purpose] (fieldwork) [notebook] ( [item] ( notebook ) [academic_field](sociology) [purpose] (fieldwork )it would produce the following output:

[notebook] ( [item] ( notebook ) [purpose] ( fieldwork ) [notebook] ([item] ( notebook ) [purpose] ( fieldwork )

To use an ordering rule to add desired material, the desired materialcan be added to the third part of the rule in the desired positionrelative to the other elements. For example, the following rule causesthe string [real_cnx]‘-’ to be added to the product description:

[real]/(integer] [fraction])=>($1 [real_cnx]‘-’ $2)

If that rule was run against the following input,

 [real] ( 11/2 ) [real] ( 15/8 )it would produce the following output:

 [real] ( 1 [real_cnx] ( − ) ½ ) [real] ( 1 [real_cnx] ( − ) ⅝ )After final processing, this converts the confusing 11/2 and 15/8 to 1½(“one and a half”) and 1⅝ (“one and five eighths”).

In addition to the foregoing normalization rules relating toterminology, the SOLx system also involves normalization rules relatingto context cues, including classification and phrasing. The rules thatthe SOLx system uses to identify contexts and determine the location andboundaries of attribute/value pairs fall into three categories:categorization rules, attribute rules, and analysis rules.Categorization rules and attribute rules together form a class of rulesknown as labeling/tagging rules. labeling/tagging rules cause theinsertion of labels/tags in the output text when the user requestsparsed or labeled/tagged texts. They form the structure of the schema ina schematization task, and they become phrase boundaries in a machinetranslation task. Analysis rules do not cause the insertion oflabels/tags in the output. They are inserted temporarily by the SOLxsystem during the processing of input, and are deleted from the outputbefore it is displayed.

Although analysis tags are not displayed in the output (SOLx can allowthe user to view them if the data is processed in a defined interactivemode), they are very important to the process of determining contextsfor vocabulary adjustment rules and for determining where labels/tagsshould be inserted. The analysis process is discussed in more detailbelow.

ii. Grammar Rules

The various rules described above for establishing normalized contentare based on grammar rules developed for a particular application. Theprocess for developing grammar rules is set forth in the followingdiscussion. Again, it will be appreciated that the SOLx tools guide anSME through the development of these rules and the SME need not have anyexpertise in this regard. There are generally two approaches to writinggrammar rules, known as “bottom up” and “top down.” Bottom-up approachesto writing grammar rules begin by looking for the smallest identifiableunits in the text and proceed by building up to larger units made up ofcohesive sets of the smaller units. Top-down approaches to writinggrammar rules begin by identifying the largest units in the text, andproceed by identifying the smaller cohesive units of which they aremade.

Consider the following data for an example of building grammar rulesfrom the bottom up. It consists of typical descriptions of variouscatheters used in invasive cardiology:

8Fr. JR4 Cordis

8 Fr. JR5 Gordis

8Fr JL4 catheter, Gordis, 6/box

8Fr pigtail 6/box

8 French pigtail catheter, 135 degree

8Fr Sones catheter, reusable

4Fr. LC angioplasty catheter with guidewire and peelaway sheath

Each of these descriptions includes some indication of the (diametric)size of the catheter, shown in bold text below:

8Fr. JR4 Gordis

8 Fr. JR5 Cordis

8Fr JL4 catheter, Cordis, 6/box

8Fr pigtail 6/box

8 French pigtail catheter, 135 degree

8Fr Sones catheter, reusable

4Fr. LC angioplasty catheter with guidewire and peelaway sheath

One can make two very broad generalizations about these indications ofcatheter size: all of them include a digit, and the digits all seem tobe integers.

One can further make two weaker generalizations about these indicationsof catheter size: all of them include either the letters Fr, or the wordFrench; and if they include the letters Fr, those two letters may or maynot be followed by a period. A subject matter expert (SME) operating theSOLx system will know that Fr, Fr., and French are all tokens of thesame thing: some indicator of the unit of catheter size. Having notedthese various forms in the data, a first rule can be written. It willtake the form x can appear as w, y, or z, and this rule will describethe different ways that x can appear in the data under analysis.The basic fact that the rule is intended to capture is French can appearas Fr, as Fr., or as French.In the grammar rules formalism, that fact may be indicated like this:

[French]  (Fr)  (Fr.)  (French)[French] is the name assigned to the category of “things that can beforms of the word that expresses the unit of size of catheters” andcould just as well have been called [catheter_size_unit], or [Fr], or[french]. The important thing is to give the category a label that ismeaningful to the user.(Fr), (Fr.), and (French) are the forms that a thing that belongs to thecategory [French] can take. Although the exact name for the category[French] is not important, it matters much more how these “rulecontents” are written. For example, the forms may be case sensitive.That is, (Fr) and (fr) are different forms. If your rule contains theform (Fr), but not the form (fr), then if there is a description likethis:8 fr cordis catheterThe fr in the description will not be recognized as expressing a unit ofcatheter size. Similarly, if your rule contained the form (fr), but notthe form (Fr), then Fr would not be recognized. “Upper-case” and“lower-case” distinctions may also matter in this part of a rule.

Returning to the list of descriptions above, a third generalization canbe made: all of the indications of catheter size include an integerfollowed by the unit of catheter size.

This suggests another rule, of the form all x consist of the sequence afollowed by b. The basic fact that the rule is intended to capture is:all indications of catheter size consist of a number followed by someform of the category [French].

In the grammar rules formalism, that fact may be indicated like this:

>[catheter_size]  ([real] [French])[catheter_size] is the name assigned to the category of “groups of wordsthat can indicate the size of a catheter;” and could just as well havebeen called [size], or [catheterSize], or [sizeOfACatheter]. Theimportant thing is to give the category a label that is meaningful tothe user.([real] [French]) is the part of the rule that describes the things thatmake up a [catheter_size]—that is, something that belongs to thecategory of things that can be [French], and something that belongs tothe categories of things that can be [real]—and what order they have toappear in—in this case, the [real] first, followed by the [French]. Inthis part of the rule, exactly how things are written is important.In this rule, the user is able to make use of the rule for [French] thatwas defined earlier. Similarly, the user is able to make use of the[real] rule for numbers that can generally be supplied as a standardrule with the Normalization Workbench. Rules can make reference to otherrules. Furthermore, rules do not have to be defined in the same file tobe used together, as long as the parser reads in the file in which theyare defined.

So far this example has involved a set of rules that allows descriptionof the size of every catheter in a list of descriptions. The SME workingwith this data might then want to write a set of rules for describingthe various catheter types in the list. Up to this point, this examplehas started with the smallest units of text that could be identified(the different forms of [French]) and worked up from there (to the[catheter_size] category). Now, the SME may have an idea of ahigher-level description (i.e., catheter type), but no lower-leveldescriptions to build it up out of; in this case, the SME may start atthe top, and think his way down through a set of rules.

The SME can see that each of these descriptions includes some indicationof the type of the catheter, shown in bold text below:

8Fr. JR4 Gordis

8 Fr. JR5 Cordis

8Fr JL4 catheter, Gordis, 6/box

8Fr pigtail 6/box

8 French pigtail catheter, 135 degree

8Fr Sones catheter, reusable

4Fr. angioplasty catheter with guidewire and peelaway sheath

He is aware that a catheter type can be described in one of two ways: bythe tip configuration of the catheter, and by the purpose of thecatheter. So, the SME may write a rule that captures the fact thatcatheter types can be identified by tip configuration or by catheterpurpose.In the grammar rules formalism, that fact may be indicated like this:

>[catheter_type]  ([catheter_tip_configuration])  ([catheter_purpose])This involves a rule for describing tip configuration, and a rule foridentifying a catheter's purpose.

Starting with tip configuration, the SME knows that catheter tipconfigurations can be described in two ways: 1) by a combination of theinventor's name, an indication of which blood vessel the catheter ismeant to engage, and by an indication of the length of the curve at thecatheter tip; or 2) by the inventor's name alone.

The SME can write a rule that indicates these two possibilities in thisway:

[catheter_tip_configuration]  ([inventor] [coronary_artery][curve_size])  ([inventor])In this rule, [catheter_tip_configuration] is the category label;([inventor] [coronary_artery] [curve_size]) and ([inventor]) are the twoforms that things that belong to this category can take. In order to usethese rules, the SME will need to write rules for [inventor],[coronary_artery], and [curve_size]. The SME knows that in all of thesecases, the possible forms that something that belongs to one of thesecategories can take are very limited, and can be listed, similarly tothe various forms of [French]:

[inventor]  (J)  (Sones) [coronary_artery]  (L)  (R) [curve_size]  (3.5) (4)  (5)

With these rules, the SME has a complete description of the[catheter_tip_configuration] category. Recall that the SME is writing a[catheter_tip_configuration] rule because there are two ways that acatheter type can be identified: by the configuration of the catheter'stip, and by the catheter's purpose. The SME has the[catheter_tip_configuration] rule written now and just needs a rule thatcaptures descriptions of a catheter's purpose.

The SME is aware that (at least in this limited data set) a catheter'spurpose can be directly indicated, e.g. by the word angioplasty, or canbe inferred from something else—in this case, the catheter's shape, asin pigtail. So, the SME writes a rule that captures the fact thatcatheter purpose can be identified by purpose indicators or by cathetershape.

In the grammar rules formalism, that fact can be indicated like this:

[catheter_purpose]   ([catheter_purpose_indicator])   ([catheter_shape])The SME needs a rule for describing catheter purpose, and a rule fordescribing catheter shape. Both of these can be simple in this example:

[catheter_purpose_indicator]   (angioplasty) [catheter_shape]  (pigtail)With this, a complete set of rules is provided for describing cathetertype, from the “top” (i.e., the [catheter type] rule) “down” (i.e., tothe rules for [inventor], [coronary_artery], [curve_size],[catheter_purpose], and [catheter_shape]).

“Top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches to writing grammar rules are botheffective, and an SME should use whichever is most comfortable orefficient for a particular data set. The bottom-up approach is generallyeasier to troubleshoot; the top-down approach is more intuitive for somepeople. A grammar writer can use some combination of both approachessimultaneously.

Grammar rules include a special type of rule called a wanker. Wankersare rules for category labels that should appear in the output of thetoken normalization process. In one implementation, wankers are writtensimilarly to other rules, except that their category label starts withthe symbol >. For example, in the preceding discussion, we wrote thefollowing wanker rules:

>[catheter_size]   ([real] [French]) >[catheter_type]  ([catheter_tip_configuration])   ([catheter_purpose])Other rules do not have this symbol preceding the category label, andare not wankers.

Chunks of text that have been described by a wanker rule will be taggedin the output of the token normalization process. For example, with therule set that we have defined so far, including the two wankers, wewould see output like the following:

[catheter_size] (8Fr.) [catheter_type] (JR4) Cordis [catheter_size] (8Fr.) [catheter_type] (JR5) Cordis [catheter_size] (8Fr) [catheter_type](JL4) catheter, Cordis, 6/box [catheter_size] (8Fr) [catheter_type](pigtail) 6/box [catheter_size] (8 French) [catheter_type] (pigtail)catheter, 135 degree [catheter_size](8Fr) [catheter_type] (Sones)catheter, reusable [catheter_size] (4Fr.) LC [catheter_type](angioplasty) catheter with guidewire and peelaway sheath

Although the other rules are used in this example to define the wankerrules, and to recognize their various forms in the input text, since theother rules are not wankers, their category labels do not appear in theoutput. If at some point it is desired to make one or more of thoseother rules' category labels to

appear in the output, the SME or other operator can cause them to do soby converting those rules to wankers.

Besides category labels, the foregoing example included two kinds ofthings in rules. First, the example included rules that contained othercategory labels. These “other” category labels are identifiable in theexample by the fact that they are always enclosed in square brackets,e.g.,

[catheter_purpose]   ([catheter_purpose_indicator])   ([catheter_shape])

The example also included rules that contained strings of text that hadto be written exactly the way that they would appear in the input. Thesestrings are identifiable by the fact that they are directly enclosed byparentheses, e.g.

[French]   (Fr)   (Fr.)   (French)

There is a third kind of thing that can be used in a rule. These things,called regular expressions, allow the user to specify approximately whata description will look like. Regular expressions can be recognized bythe facts that, unlike the other kinds of rule contents, they are notenclosed by parentheses, and they are immediately enclosed by “forwardslashes.”

Regular expressions in rules look like this:

[angiography_catheter_french_size]   /7|8/ [rocket_engine_size]  /{circumflex over ( )}X\d{2}/ [naval_vessel_hull_number]   /\w+\d+/

Although the foregoing example illustrated specific implementations ofspecific rules, it will be appreciated that a virtually endless varietyof specialized rules may be provided in accordance with the presentinvention. The SOLx system of the present invention consists of manycomponents, as will be described below. One of these components is theNatural Language Engine module, or NLE. The NLE module evaluates eachitem description in data under analysis by means of rules that describethe ways in which core items and their attributes can appear in thedata. The exact (machine-readable) format that these rules take can varydepending upon the application involved and computing environment. Forpresent purposes, it is sufficient to realize that these rules expressrelationships like the following (stated in relation to the drillexample discussed above):

-   -   Descriptions of a drill include the manufacturer's name, the        drill size, and may also include a list of accessories and        whether or not it is battery powered.    -   A drill's size may be three eighths of an inch or one half inch    -   inch may be written as inch or as ″    -   If inch is written as ″, then it may be written with or without        a space between the numbers ⅜ or ½ and the ″

The NLE checks each line of the data individually to see if any of therules seem to apply to that line. If a rule seems to apply, then the NLEinserts a label/tag and marks which string of words that rule seemed toapply to. For example, for the set of rules listed above, then in theitem description Black and Decker ⅜″ drill with accessories, the NLEmodule would notice that ⅜″ might be a drill size, and would mark it assuch. If the user is running the NLE in interactive mode, he may observesomething like this in the output:

[drill_size] (⅜″)

In addition to the rules listed above, a complete set of rules fordescribing the ways that item descriptions for/of drills and theirattributes would also include rules for manufacturers' names, accessorylists, and whether or not the drill is battery powered. If the userwrites such a set of rules, then in the item description Black andDecker ⅜″ drill with accessories, the NLE module will notice andlabel/tag the following attributes of the description:

[manufacturer_name] (Black and Decker) [drill_size] (⅜″)

The performance of the rules can be analyzed in two stages. First,determine whether or not the rules operate adequately. Second, if it isidentified that rules that do not operate adequately, determine why theydo not operate adequately.

For translations, the performance of the rules can be determined byevaluating the adequacy of the translations in the output text. Forschematization, the performance of the rules can be determined byevaluating the adequacy of the schema that is suggested by running therule set. For any rule type, if a rule has been identified that does notperform adequately, it can be determined why it does not operateadequately by operating the NLE component in interactive mode withoutput to the screen.

For tagging rules, test data set can be analyzed to determine if: everyitem that should be labeled/tagged has been labeled/tagged and any itemthat should not have been labeled/tagged has been labeled/tagged inerror.

In order to evaluate the rules in this way, the test data set mustinclude both items that should be labeled/tagged, and items that shouldnot be tagged.

Vocabulary adjustment rules operate on data that has been processed bytagging/tagging rules, so troubleshooting the performance of vocabularyadjustment rules requires attention to the operation of tagging/taggingrules, as well as to the operation of the vocabulary adjustment rulesthemselves.

In general, the data set selected to evaluate the performance of therules should include: examples of different types of core items, and foreach type of core item, examples with different sets of attributesand/or attribute values.

b. Processing

1. Searching

Normalization facilitates a variety of further processing options. Oneimportant type of processing is translation as noted above and furtherdescribed below. However, other types of processing in addition to orinstead of translation are enhanced by normalization including databaseand network searching, document location and retrieval,interest/personality matching, information aggregation forresearch/analysis, etc.

For purposes of illustration, a database and network searchingapplication will now be described. It will be appreciated that this isclosely related to the context assisted searching described above. Inmany cases, it is desirable to allow for searching across semanticboundaries. For example, a potential individual or business consumer maydesire to access company product descriptions or listings that may becharacterized by abbreviations and other terms, as well as syntax, thatare unique to the company or otherwise insufficiently standardized toenable easy access. Additionally, submitting queries for searchinginformation via a network (e.g., LAN, WAN, proprietary or open) issubject to considerable lexicographic uncertainty, even within a singlelanguage environment, which uncertainty expands geometrically in thecontext of multiple languages. It is common for a searcher to submitqueries that attempt to encompass a range of synonyms or conceptuallyrelated terms when attempting to obtain complete search results.However, this requires significant knowledge and skill and is oftenimpractical, especially in a multi-language environment. Moreover, insome cases, a searcher, such as a consumer without specialized knowledgeregarding a search area, may be insufficiently knowledgeable regarding ataxonomy or classification structure of the subject matter of interestto execute certain search strategies for identifying information ofinterest through a process of progressively narrowing the scope ofresponsive information based on conceptual/class relationships.

It will be observed that the left panel 102 of FIG. 1 graphicallydepicts a portion of a taxonomy where, for example, the units of measure“liter” and “ounce”, as well as variants thereof, are subclasses of theclass “volume.” Thus, for example, a searcher entering a query includingthe term “ounce” (or “oz”) may access responsive information for adatabase or the like including the term “oz” or (“ounce”). Moreover,metric equivalent items, e.g., including the term “ml,” may be retrievedin response to the query based on tags commonly linking the search termand the responsive item to the class “volume.” In these cases, bothnormalization (oz=ounce) and classification (<_volume<<ounce>><<liter>>_>) (where the markings < > and << >> indicate parent-child tagrelationships) are used to enhance the search functionality. Suchnormalization may involve normalizing a locale-specific search termand/or normalizing terms in a searched database to a normalized form. Itwill be appreciated that the normalized (or unnormalized) terms may betranslated from one language to another, as disclosed herein, to providea further degree of search functionality.

Moreover, such normalization and classification assisted searches arenot limited to the context of product descriptions but may extend to theentirety of any language. In this regard, FIG. 19 illustrates a taxonomy1900 related to the area of mechanics that may be used in connectionwith research related to small aircraft runway accidents attributed tofollowing in the wake of larger aircraft. Terms 1902 representalternative terms that may be normalized by an SME using the presentinvention, such as an administrator of a government crash investigationdatabase, to the normalized terms 1904, namely, “vorticity” and “wake.”These terms 1904 may be associated with a parent classification 1906(“wingtip vortices”) which in turn is associated with a grandparentclassification 1908 (“aerodynamic causes”) and so on. In this context,normalization allows for mapping of a range of colloquial or scientificsearch terms into predefined taxonomy, or for tagging of documentsincluding such terms relative to the taxonomy. The taxonomy can then beused to resolve, lexicographic ambiguities and to retrieve relevantdocuments.

FIG. 20 is a flowchart illustrating a process 2000 for constructing adatabase for enhanced searching using normalization and classification.The illustrated process 2000 is initiated by establishing (2002) ataxonomy for the relevant subject matter. This may be performed by anSME and will generally involve dividing the subject matter intoconceptual categories and subcategories that collectively define thesubject matter. In many cases, such categories may be defined byreference materials or industry standards. The SME may also establish(2004) normalization rules, as discussed above, for normalizing avariety of terms or phrases into a smaller number of normalized terms.For example, this may involve surveying a collection or database ofdocuments to identify sets of corresponding terms, abbreviations andother variants. It will be appreciated that the taxonomy andnormalization rules may be supplemented and revised over time based onexperience to enhance operation of the system.

Once the initial taxonomy and normalization rules have been established,a document to be stored is received (2004) and parsed (2006) intoappropriate chunks, e.g., words or phrases. Normalization rules are thenapplied (2008) to map the chunks into normalized expressions. Dependingon the application, the document may be revised to reflect thenormalized expressions, or the normalized expressions may merely be usedfor processing purposes. In any case, the normalized expressions arethen used to define (2010) a taxonomic lineage (e.g., wingtip vortices,aerodynamic causes, etc.) for the subject term and to apply (2012)corresponding tags. The tagged document (2014) is then stored and thetags can be used to retrieve, print, display, transmit, etc., thedocument or a portion thereof. For example, the database may be searchedbased on classification or a term of a query may be normalized and thenormalized term may be associated with a classification to identifyresponsive documents.

The SOLx paradigm is to use translators to translate repeatable complexterms and phrases, and translation rules to link these phrases together.It uses the best of both manual and machine translation. The SOLx systemuses computer technology for repetitive or straightforward applications,and uses people for the complex or special-case situations. The NorTran(Normalization/Translation) server is designed to support this paradigm.FIG. 3 represents a high-level architecture of the NorTran platform 300.Each module is discussed below as it relates to thenormalization/classification process. A more detailed description isprovided below in connection with the overall SOLx schematic diagramdescription for configuration and run-time operation.

The GUI 302 is the interface between the subject matter expert (SME) orhuman translator (HT) and the core modules of the NorTran server.Through this interface, SMEs and HTs define the filters for contentchunking, classification access dictionaries, create the terms andphrases dictionaries, and monitor and edit the translated content.

This N-Gram 304 filter for the N-gram analysis defines the parametersused in the N-gram program. The N-gram program is the key statisticaltool for identifying the key reoccurring terms and phrases of theoriginal content.

The N-Gram and other statistical tools module 306 is a set of parsingand statistical tools that analyze the original content for significantterms and phrases. The tools parse for the importance of two or morewords or tokens as defined by the filter settings. The output is asorted list of terms with the estimated probabilities of the importanceof the term in the totality of the content. The goal is to aggregate thelargest re-usable chunks and have them directly classified andtranslated.

The chunking classification assembly and grammar rules set 308 relatesthe pieces from one language to another. For example, as discussedearlier, two noun phrases N₁N₂ are mapped in Spanish as N₂ ‘de’ N₁.Rules may need to be added or existing ones modified by the translator.The rules are used by the translation engine with the dictionaries andthe original content (or the normalized content) to reassemble thecontent in its translated form.

The rules/grammar base language pairs and translation engine 310constitute a somewhat specialized machine translation (MT) system. Thetranslation engine portion of this system may utilize any of variouscommercially available translation tools with appropriate configurationof its dictionaries.

Given that the translation process is not an exact science and thatround trip processes (translations from A to B to A) rarely work, astatistical evaluation is likely the best automatic tool to assess theacceptability of the translations. The Translation Accuracy Analyzer 312assesses words not translated, heuristics for similar content, baselineanalysis from human translation and other criteria.

The chunking and translation editor 314 functions much like atranslator's workbench. This tool has access to the original content;helps the SME create normalized content if required; the normalizedcontent and dictionaries help the translator create the translated termsand phase dictionary, and when that repository is created, helps thetranslator fill in any missing terms in the translation of the originalcontent. A representation of the chunking functionality of this editoris shown in the example in Table 3.

TABLE 3 Chunk Chunked Orig Original Content Normalized Terms Freq No.Cont Round Baker (A) Poland Emile Henry 6 1 7-A-6 Round Baker withHandles (B) Poland Oval Baker 6 2 7-18-B-6 Oval Baker (C) Red E. HenryLasagna Baker 4 3 2-C-15-1 Oval Baker (D) Polish Pottery Polish Pottery4 4 2-D-5 Oval Baker (E) Red, Emile Henry Poland 2 5 2-E-15-1 Oval Baker(F) Polish Pottery Round Baker 2 6 2-F-5 Oval Baker (G) Polish PotteryBaker Chicken Shaped 1 7 2-G-5 Oval Baker Polish Pottery (H) Baker DeepDish SIGNITURE 1 8 2--5-H Lasagna Baker (I) Emile Henry Cobalt Bakerwith cover/handles 1 9 4-I-1-13 Lasagna Baker (I) Emile Henry GreenBaker Rectangular 1 10 4-I-1-14 Lasagna Baker (I) Emile Henry RedCeramic 1 11 4-I-1-15 Lasagna Baker (I) Emile Henry Yellow cobalt 1 124-I-1-17 Baker Chicken Shaped (J) green 1 13 8-J Baker Deep DishSIGNATURE (K) red 1 14 9-K Baker Rectangular (L) White Ceramic Signature1 15 11-L-18-12 Baker with cover/handles Polish Pottery yellow 1 16 10-5white 1 17 with Handles 1 18The first column lists the original content from a parts list of cookingdishes. The term (A) etc. are dimensional measurements that are notrelevant to the discussion. The second column lists the chunked termsfrom an N-gram analysis; the third column lists the frequency of eachterm in the original content set. The fourth column is the numberassociated with the chunk terms in column 2. The fifth column is therepresentation of the first column in terms of the sequence of chunkedcontent. Although not shown, a classification lineage is also associatedwith each chunk to assist in translation, e.g., by resolvingambiguities.

If the translation of each chunk is stored in another column, andtranslation rules exist for reassembling the chunks, then the content istranslated. It could be listed in another column that would have adirect match or link to the original content. Table 4 lists thenormalized and translated normalized content.

TABLE 4 Normalized Terms Spanish Translation Emile Henry Emile HenryOval Baker Molde de Hornear Ovalado Lasagna Baker Molde de Hornear paraLasagna Polish Pottery Alfareria Polaca Poland Polonia (if Country),Poland (if brandname) Round Baker Molde de Hornear Redondo BakerChicken- Molde de Hornear en Forma de Pollo Shaped Baker Deep Dish Moldede Hornear Plato Profundo SIGNATURE SIGNITURE Baker with Molde deHornear con Tapa/Asas cover/handles Baker Molde de Hornear RectangularRectangular Ceramic Alfareria cobalt Cobalto green Verde red RojoSignature SIGNATURE (brandname) FIRMA (not brand name) yellow Amarillowhite Blanco with Handles Con Asas

Finally, Table 5 shows the Original Content and the Translated Contentthat is created by assembling the Translated Normalized Terms in Table 4according to the Chunked Original Content sequence in Table 3.

TABLE 5 Original Content Translated Content Round Baker (A) Poland Moldede Hornear Redondo (A) Polonia Round Baker with Handles (B) Poland Moldede Hornear Redondo Con Asas (B) Polonia Oval Baker (C) Red Emile HenryMolde de Hornear Ovalado Rojo Emile Henry Oval Baker (D) Polish PotteryMolde de Hornear Ovalado (D) Alfareria Polaca Oval Baker (E) Red, EmileHenry Molde de Hornear Ovalado (E) Rojo, Emile Henry Oval Baker (F)Polish Pottery Molde de Hornear Ovalado (F) Alfareria Polaca Oval Baker(G) Polish Pottery Molde de Hornear Ovalado (G) Alfareria Polaca OvalBaker Polish Pottery (H) Molde de Hornear Ovalado Alfareria Polaca (H)Lasagna Baker (I) Emile Henry Cobalt Molde de Hornear para Lasagna (I)Emile Henry Cobalto Lasagna Baker (I) Emile Henry Green Molde de Hornearpara Lasagna (I) Emile Henry Verde Lasagna Baker (I) Emile Henry RedMolde de Hornear para Lasagna (I) Emile Henry Rojo Lasagna Baker (I)Emile Henry Yellow Molde de Hornear para Lasagna (I) Emile HenryAmarillo Baker Chicken Shaped (J) Molde de Hornear en Forma de Pollo (J)Baker Deep Dish SIGNATURE (K) Molde de Hornear Plato Profundo SIGNATURE(K) Baker Rectangular (L) White Ceramic Molde de Hornear Rectangular (L)Blanco Alfareria Baker with cover/handles Polish Pottery Molde deHornear con Tapa/Asas Alfareria Polaca

This example shows that when appropriately “chunked,” machinetranslation grammar knowledge for noun phrases can be minimized.However, it cannot be eliminated entirely.

Referring to FIG. 3, the Normalized Special Terms and Phrases repository316 contains chunked content that is in a form that supports manualtranslation. It is free of unusual acronyms, misspellings, and strivedfor consistency. In Table 3 for example, Emile Henry was also listed asE. Henry. Terms usage is maximized.

The Special Terms and Phrases Translation Dictionary repository 318 isthe translated normalized terms and phrases content. It is the specialtydictionary for the client content.

Other translation dictionaries 320 may be any of various commerciallyavailable dictionary tools and/or SOLx developed databases. They may begeneral terms dictionaries, industry specific, SOLx acquired content, orany other knowledge that helps automate the process.

One of the tenets of the SOLx process is that the original content neednot be altered. Certainly, there are advantages to make the content asinternally consistent as possible, and to define some form of structureor syntax to make translations easier and more accurate. However, thereare situations where a firm's IT department does not want the originalcontent modified in any way. Taking advantage of the benefits ofnormalized content, but without actually modifying the original, SOLxuses a set of meta or non-persistent stores so that the translations arebased on the normalized meta content 322. Tags reflecting classificationinformation may also be kept here.

The above discussion suggests a number of processes that may beimplemented for the automatic translation of large databases ofstructured content. One implementation of these processes is illustratedin the flowchart of FIG. 4 and is summarized below. It will beappreciated that these processes and the ordering thereof can bemodified.

First, the firm's IT organization extracts 400 the content from their ITsystems—ideally with a part number or other unique key. As discussedabove, one of the key SOLx features is that the client need notrestructure or alter the original content in their IT databases.However, there are reasons to do so. In particular, restructuringbenefits localization efforts by reducing the translation set up timeand improving the translation accuracy. One of these modifications is toadopt a ‘normalized’ or fixed syntactic, semantic, and grammaticaldescription of each content entry.

Next, software tools identify (402) the most important terms andphrases. Nearest neighbor, filtered N-gram, and other analysis toolsidentify the most used and important phrases and terms in the content.The content is analyzed one description or item at a time and re-usablechunks are extracted.

Subject matter experts then “internationalize” (404) the important termsand phrases. These experts “translate” the abbreviations and acronyms,correct misspellings and in general redefine and terms that would beambiguous for translation. This is a list of normalized terms andphrases. It references the original list of important terms and phrases.The SMEs also associate such terms and phrases with a classificationlineage.

Translators can then translate (406) the internationalized importantterms and phrases. This translated content forms a dictionary ofspecialty terms and phrases. In essence, this translated contentcorresponds to the important and re-usable chunks. Depending on thetranslation engine used, the translator may need to specify the genderalternatives, plural forms, and other language specific information forthe special terms and phrases dictionary. Referring again to an examplediscussed above, translators would probably supply the translation for(four-strand), (color-coded), (twisted-pair), telephone, and wire. Thisassumes that each term was used repeatedly. Any other entry that uses(color-coded) or wire would use the pre-translated term.

Other dictionaries for general words and even industry specificnomenclature can then be consulted (408) as available. This sameapproach could be used for the creation of general dictionaries.However, for purposes of this discussion it is assumed that they alreadyexist.

Next, language specific rules are used to define (410) the assembly oftranslated content pieces. The types of rules described above define theway the pre-translated chunks are reassembled. If, in any onedescription, the grammatical structure is believed to be morecomplicated than the pre-defined rule set, then the phrase is translatedin its entirety.

The original content (on a per item basis) is then mapped (412) againstthe dictionaries. Here, the line item content is parsed and thedictionaries are searched for the appropriate chunked and more generalterms (content chunks to translated chunks). Ideally, all terms in thedictionaries map to a single-line item in the content database, i.e. asingle product description. This is the first function of thetranslation engine. The classification information may be used to assistin this mapping and to resolve ambiguities.

A software translation engine then assembles (414) the translated piecesagainst the language rules. Input into the translation engine includesthe original content, the translation or assembly rules, and thetranslated pieces. A translation tool will enable a translator tomonitor the process and directly intercede if required. This couldinclude adding a new chunk to the specialty terms database, oroverriding the standard terms dictionaries.

A statistically based software tool assesses (416) the potentialaccuracy of the translated item. One of the difficulties of translationis that when something is translated from one language to another andthen retranslated back to the first, the original content is rarelyreproduced. Ideally, one hopes it is close, but rarely will it be exact.The reason for this is there is not a direct inverse in languagetranslation. Each language pair has a circle of ‘confusion’ oracceptability. In other words, there is a propagation of error in thetranslation process. Short of looking at every translated phrase, thebest than can be hoped for in an overall sense is a statisticalevaluation.

Translators may re-edit (418) the translated content as required. Sincethe content is stored in a database that is indexed to the originalcontent on an entry-by-entry basis, any entry may be edited and restoredif this process leads to an unsatisfactory translation.

Although not explicitly described, there are terms such as proper nouns,trade names, special terms, etc., that are never translated. Theidentification of these invariant terms would be identified in the aboveprocess. Similarly, converted entries such as metrics would be handledthrough a metrics conversion process.

The process thus discussed uses both human and machine translation in adifferent way than traditionally employed. This process, with thecorrect software systems in place should generate much of the accuracyassociated with manual translation. Further, this process shouldfunction without manual intervention once sufficient content has beenpre-translated.

The various configuration processes are further illustrated by thescreenshots of FIGS. 5-10. Although these figures depict screenshots, itwill be appreciated that these figures would not be part of the userinterface as seen by an SME or other operator. Rather, these screenshotsare presented here for purposes of illustration and the associatedfunctionality would, to a significant extent, be implementedtransparently. These screenshots show the general processing of sourcecontent. The steps are importing the data, normalizing the data based ona set of grammars and rules produced by the SME using the NTW userinterface, then analysis of the content to find phrases that need to betranslated, building a translation dictionary containing the discoveredphrases, translation of the normalized content, and finally, estimationof the quality of the translated content.

The first step, as illustrated in FIG. 5, is to import the sourcestructured content file. This will be a flat set file with the propercharacter encoding, e.g., UTF-8. There will generally be one itemdescription per line. Some basic formatting of the input may be done atthis point.

FIG. 6 shows normalized form of the content on the right and theoriginal content (as imported above) on the left. What is not shown hereare the grammars and rules used to perform the normalization. The formof the grammars and rules and how to created them are described above.

In this example, various forms of the word resistor that appear on theoriginal content, for example “RES” or RESS” have been normalized to theform “resistor”. The same is true for “W” being transformed to “watt”and “MW” to “milliwatt”. Separation was added between text items, forexample, “¼W” is now “¼ watt” or “75 OHM” is now “75 ohm”. Punctuationcan also be added or removed, for example, “RES,35.7” is now “resistor35.7”. Not shown in the screenshot: the order of the text can also bestandardized by the normalization rules. For example, if the user alwayswant a resistor description to of the form:

-   -   resistor <ohms rating> <tolerance> <watts rating>        the normalization rules can enforce this standard form, and the        normalized content would reflect this structure.

Another very valuable result of the normalization step can be to createa schematic representation of the content. In the phrase analysis step,as illustrated, the user is looking for the phrases in the nownormalized content that still need to be translated to the targetlanguage. The purpose of Phrase Analysis, and in fact, the next severalsteps, is to create a translation dictionary that will be used bymachine translation. The value in creating the translation dictionary isthat only the phrases need translation not the complete body of text,thus providing a huge savings in time and cost to translate. The PhraseAnalyzer only shows us here the phrases that it does not already have atranslation for. Some of these phrases we do not want to translate,which leads us to the next step.

In the filter phrases step as shown in FIG. 7, an SME reviews thisphrase data and determines which phrases should be translated. Once theSME has determined which phrases to translate, then a professionaltranslator and/or machine tool translates the phrases (FIGS. 8-9) fromthe source language, here English, to the target language, here Spanish,using any associated classification information. A SOLx user interfacecould be used to translate the phrases, or the phrases are sent out to aprofessional translator as a text file for translation. The translatedtext is returned as a text file and loaded into SOLx. The translatedphrases become the translation dictionary that is then used by themachine translation system.

The machine translation system uses the translation dictionary createdabove as the source for domain specific vocabulary. By providing thedomain specific vocabulary in the form of the translation dictionary,the SOLx system greatly increases the quality of the output from themachine translation system.

The SOLx system can also then provide an estimation of the quality ofthe translation result (FIG. 10). Good translations would then be loadedinto the run-time localization system for use in the source systemarchitecture. Bad translations would be used to improve thenormalization grammars and rules, or the translation dictionary. Thegrammars, rules, and translation dictionary form a model of the content.Once the model of the content is complete, a very high level oftranslations are of good quality.

Particular implementations of the above described configurationprocesses can be summarized by reference to the flowcharts of FIGS.11-12. Specifically, FIG. 11 summarizes the steps of an exemplarynormalization configuration process and FIG. 12 summarizes an exemplarytranslation configuration process.

Referring first to FIG. 11, a new SOLx normalization process (1000) isinitiated by importing (1102) the content of a source database orportion thereof to be normalized and selecting a quantify of text from asource database. For example, a sample of 100 item descriptions may beselected from the source content “denoted content.txt file.” A texteditor may be used to select the 100 lines. These 100 lines are thensaved to a file named samplecontent.txt for purposes of this discussion.

The core items in the samplecontent.txt file are then found (1104) usingthe Candidate Search Engine, for example, by running a words-in-commonsearch. Next, attribute/value information is found (1106) in thesamplecontent.txt file using the Candidate Search Engine by runningcollocation and semantic category searches as described above. Once theattributes/values have been identified, the SOLx system can be used towrite (1108) attribute rules. The formalism for writing such rules hasbeen discussed above. It is noted that the SOLx system performs much ofthis work for the user and simple user interfaces can be provided toenable “writing” of these rules without specialized linguistic ordetailed code-writing skills. The SOLx system can also be used at thispoint to write (1110) categorization or classification rules. As notedabove, such categorization rules are useful in defining a context foravoiding or resolving ambiguities in the transformation process.Finally, the coverage of the data set can be analyzed (1112) to ensuresatisfactory run time performance. It will be appreciated that theconfiguration process yields a tool that can not only translate those“chunks” that were processed during configuration, but can alsosuccessfully translate new items based on the knowledge base acquiredand developed during configuration. The translation process issummarized below.

Referring to FIG. 12, the translation process 1200 is initiated byacquiring (1202) the total set of item descriptions that you want totranslate as a flat file, with a single item description per line. Forpurposes of the present discussion, it is assumed that the itemdescriptions are in a file with the name of content.txt. A text editormay be used to setup an associated project configuration file.

Next, a sample of 100 item descriptions is selected (1204) from thecontent.txt file. A text editor may be used to select the 100 lines.These 100 lines to a file named samplecontent.txt.

The translation process continues with finding (1206) candidates forvocabulary adjustment rules in the samplecontent.txt file using theCandidate Search Engine. The Candidate Search Engine may implement acase variant search and full/abbreviated variant search, as well as aclassification analysis, at this point in the process. The resultinginformation can be used to write vocabulary adjustment rules. Vocabularyadjustment rules may be written to convert abbreviated forms to theirfull forms.

Next, candidates for labeling/tagging rules are found (1208) in thesample/content.txt file using the Candidate Search Engine.Labeling/tagging rules may be written to convert semantic category andcollocation forms. Attribute rules can then be written (1210) followingthe steps set forth in the previous flowchart.

Vocabulary adjustment rules are then run (1212) using the NaturalLanguage Engine against the original content. Finally, the coverage ofthe data set can be analyzed (1214) evaluating performance of yourvocabulary adjustment rules and evaluating performance of your attributerules. At this point, if the proper coverage is being achieved by thevocabulary adjustment rules, then the process proceeds to building(1216) a domain-specific dictionary. Otherwise, a new set of 100 itemdescriptions can be selected for analysis and the intervening steps arerepeated.

To build a domain specific dictionary, the SME can run a translationdictionary creation utility. This runs using the rule files createdabove as input, and produces the initial translation dictionary file.This translation dictionary file contains the words and phrases thatwere found in the rules. The words and phrases found in the translationdictionary file can then be manually and/or machine translated (1218).This involves extracting a list of all word types using a text editorand then translating the normalized forms manually or through a machinetool such as SYSTRAN. The translated forms can then be inserted into thedictionary file that was previously output.

Next, the SME can run (1220) the machine translation module, run therepair module, and run the TQE module. The file outputs from TQE arereviewed (1222) to determine whether the translation results areacceptable. The acceptable translated content can be loaded (1224) intothe Localized Content Server (LCS), if desired. The remainder of thetranslated content can be analyzed (1226) to determine what changes tomake to the normalization and translation knowledge bases in order toimprove the quality of the translation. Words and phrases that should bedeleted during the translation process can be deleted (1228) andpart-of-speech labels can be added, if needed. The SME can then create(1230) a file containing the translated words in the source and targetlanguages. Once all of the content is found to be acceptable, the systemis fully trained. The good translated content is then loaded into theLCS.

It has been found that it is useful to provide graphical feedback duringnormalization to assist the SME in monitoring progress. Any appropriateuser interface may be provided in this regard. FIG. 13 shows an exampleof such an interface. As shown, the graphical desktop 1300 is dividedinto multiple workspaces, in this case, including workspaces 1302, 1304and 1306. One workspace 1302 presents the source file content that is inprocess, e.g., being normalized and translated. A second area 1304, inthis example, functions as the normalization workbench interface and isused to perform the various configuration processes such as replacingvarious abbreviations and expressions with standardized terms or, in theillustrated example, defining a parse tree. Additional workspaces suchas workspace 1306 may be provided for accessing other tools such as theCandidate Search Engine which can identify terms for normalization or,as shown, allow for selection of rules. In the illustrated example,normalized terms are highlighted relative to the displayed source filein workspace 1302 on a currently updated basis. In this manner, the SMEcan readily determine when all or enough of the source file has beennormalized.

In a traditional e-business environment, this translation processessentially is offline. It becomes real-time and online when new contentis added to the system. In this case, assuming well-developedspecial-purpose dictionaries and linguistic information already exists,the process can proceed in an automatic fashion. Content, oncetranslated is stored in a specially indexed look-up database. Thisdatabase functions as a memory translation repository. With this type ofstorage environment, the translated content can be scaled to virtuallyany size and be directly accessed in the e-business process. Theassociated architecture for supporting both configuration and run-timeoperation is discussed below.

B. SOLx Architecture

1 Network Architecture Options

The SOLx system operates in two distinct modes. The “off-line” mode isused to capture knowledge from the SME/translator and knowledge aboutthe intended transformation of the content. This collectively defines aknowledge base. The off-line mode includes implementation of theconfiguration and translation processes described above. Once theknowledge base has been constructed, the SOLx system can be used in afile in/file out manner to transform content.

The SOLx system may be implemented in a variety of business-to-business(B2B) or other frameworks, including those shown in FIG. 14. Here theSource 1402, the firm that controls the original content 1404, can beinterfaced with three types of content processors 1406. The SOLx system1400 can interface at three levels: with a Local Platform 1408(associated with the source 1402), with a Target Platform 1410(associated with a target to whom the communication is addressed or isotherwise consumed by) and with a Global Platform 1412 (separate fromthe source 1402 and target 1408).

A primary B2B model of the present invention focuses on a Source/Sellermanaging all transformation/localization. The Seller will communicatewith other Integration Servers (such as WebMethods) and bareapplications in a “Point to Point” fashion, therefore, all locales anddata are registered and all localization is done on the seller side.However, all or some of the localization may be managed by the buyer oron a third party platform such as the global platform.

Another model, which may be implemented using the global server, wouldallow two SOLx B2B-enabled servers to communicate in a neutralenvironment, e.g. English. Therefore, a Spanish and a Japanese systemcan communicate in English by configuring and registering the localcommunication in SOLx B2B.

A third model would include a local seller communicating directly (viaHTTP) with the SOLx B2B enabled Buyer.

2. Network Interface

Previously, it was discussed how structured content is localized. Thenext requirement is to rapidly access this content. If there are ongoingrequests to access a particular piece of localized content, it may beinefficient to continually translate the original entry. The issues, ofcourse, are speed and potentially quality assurance. One solution is tostore the translated content along with links to the original with avery fast retrieval mechanism for accessing the translated content. Thisis implemented by the SOLx Globalization Server.

The SOLx Globalization server consists of two major components (1) theDocument Processing Engine and (2) the Translated Content Server (TCS).The Document Processing Engine is a WebMethods plug-compatibleapplication that manages and dispenses localized content throughXML-tagged business objects. The TCS contains language-paired contentthat is accessed through a cached database. This architecture assuresvery high-speed access to translated content.

This server uses a hash index on the translated content cross-indexedwith the original part number or a hash index on the equivalent originalcontent, if there is not a unique part number. A direct link between theoriginal and translated content via the part number (or hash entry)assures retrieval of the correct entry. The indexing scheme alsoguarantees very fast retrieval times. The process of adding a newlocalized item to the repository consists of creating the hash index,link to the original item, and its inclusion into the repository. TheTCS will store data in Unicode format.

The TCS can be used in a standalone mode where content can be accessedby the SKU or part number of the original item, or through text searchesof either the original content or its translated variant. If the hashedindex of the translated content is known. It, of course, can be assessedthat way. Additionally, the TCS will support SQL style queries throughthe standard Oracle SQL query tools.

The Document Processing Engine is the software component of theGlobalization Server that allows localized content in the TCS to beintegrated into typical B2B Web environments and system-to-systemtransactions. XML is rapidly replacing EDI as the standard protocol forWeb-based B2B system-to-system communication. There are a number of coretechnologies often call “adaptors” or “integration servers” thattranslate ERP content, structures, and formats, from one systemenvironment to another. WebMethods is one such adaptor but any suchtechnology may be employed.

FIG. 15 shows a conventional web system 1500 where, the WebMethodsintegration server 1502 takes as input an SAP-formatted content calledan IDOC 1504 from a source back office 1501 via API 1503 and converts itinto an XML-formatted document 1506 for transmission over the Web 1508via optional application server 1510 and HTTP servers 1512 to some otherreceiver such as a Target back office 1510 or other ERP system. Thedocument 1506 may be transmitted to Target back office 1514 via HTTPservers 1516 and an integration server 1518.

FIG. 16 shows the modification of such a system that allows the TCS 1600containing translated content to be accessed in a Web environment. Inthis figure, original content from the source system 1602 is translatedby the NorTran Server 1604 and passed to a TCS repository 1606. Atransaction request, whether requested from a foreign system or thesource system 1602, will pass into the TCS 1600 through the DocumentProcessing Engine 1608. From there, a communication can be transmittedacross the Web 1610 via integration server adaptors 1612, an integrationserver 1614, an optional application server 1616 and HTTP servers 1618.

3. SOLx Component Structure

FIG. 17 depicts the major components of one implementation of the SOLxsystem 1700 and the SOLx normalization/classification processes asdiscussed above. The NorTran Workbench/Server 1702 is that component ofthe SOLx system 1700 that, under the control of a SME/translator 1704,creates normalized/translated content. The SOLx Server 1708 isresponsible for the delivery of content either as previously cachedcontent or as content that is created from the real-time application ofthe knowledge bases under control of various SOLx engines.

The initial step in either a normalization or translation process is toaccess legacy content 1710 that is associated with the firms' variouslegacy systems 1712. The legacy content 1710 may be provided as level 1commerce data consisting of short descriptive phrases delivered as flatfile structures that are used as input into the NorTran Workbench 1702.

There are a number of external product and part classification schemas1714, both proprietary and public. These schemas 1714 relate one classof part in terms of a larger or more general family, a taxonomy of partsfor example. These schemas 1714 define the attributes that differentiateone part class from another. For example, in bolts, head style is anattribute for various types of heads such as hex, fillister, Phillips,etc. Using this knowledge in the development of the grammar rules willdrastically shorten the time to normalize large quantities of data.Further, it provides a reference to identify many of the synonyms andabbreviations that are used to describe the content.

The NorTran Workbench (NTW) 1702 is used to learn the structure andvocabulary of the content. The NTW user interface 1716 allows the SME1704 to quickly provide the system 1700 with knowledge about thecontent. This knowledge is captured in the form of content parsinggrammars, normalization rules, and the translation dictionary. As theSME 1704 “trains” the system 1700 in this manner, he can test to see howmuch of the content is understood based on the knowledge acquired sofar. Once the structure and vocabulary are well understood, in otherwords an acceptable coverage has been gained, then NTW 1702 is used tonormalize and translate large quantities of content.

Thus, one purpose of NTW 1702 is to allow SMEs 1704 to use a visual toolto specify rules for parsing domain data and rules for writing outparsed data in a normalized form. The NTW 1702 allows the SME 1704 tochoose data samples from the main domain data, then to select a line ata time from that sample. Using visual tools such as drag and drop, andconnecting items on a screen to establish relationships, the SME 1704can build up parse rules that tell the Natural Language Engine (NLE)1718 how to parse the domain data. The SME 1704 can then use visualtools to create rules to specify how the parsed data will be assembledfor output—whether the data should be reordered, how particular groupsof words should be represented, and so on. The NTW 1702 is tightlyintegrated with the NLE 1718. While the NTW 1702 allows the user toeasily create, see, and edit parse rules and normalization rules, theNLE 1718 creates and stores grammars from these rules.

Although content parsing grammars, normalization rules, and contexttokens constitute the core knowledge created by the SME 1704 using thesystem 1700, the GUI 1716 does not require the SME 1704 to have anybackground in computational linguistic, natural language processing orother abstract language skill whatsoever. The content SME 1704 mustunderstand what the content really is, and translators must be technicaltranslators. A “butterfly valve” in French does not translate to theFrench words for butterfly and valve.

The CSE 1720 is a system initially not under GUI 1716 control thatidentifies terms and small text strings that repeat often throughout thedata set and are good candidates for the initial normalization process.

One purpose of this component is to address issues of scale in findingcandidates for grammar and normalization rules. The SOLx system 1700provides components and processes that allow the SME 1704 to incorporatethe knowledge that he already has into the process of writing rules.However, some domains and data sets are so large and complex that theyrequire normalization of things other than those that the SME 1704 isalready aware of. Manually discovering these things in a large data setis time-consuming and tedious. The CSE 1720 allows automatic applicationof the “rules of thumb” and other heuristic techniques that dataanalysts apply in finding candidates for rule writing.

The CSE component works through the programmatic application ofheuristic techniques for the identification of rule candidates. Theseheuristics were developed from applying knowledge elicitation techniquesto two experienced grammar writers. The component is given a body ofinput data, applies heuristics to that data, and returns a set of rulecandidates.

The N-Gram Analysis (NGA) lexical based tool 1722 identifies word andstring patterns that reoccur in the content. It identifies single andtwo and higher word phrases that repeat throughout the data set. It isone of the core technologies in the CSE 1720. It is also used toidentify those key phrases that should be translated after the contenthas been normalized.

The N-Gram Analysis tool 1722 consists of a basic statistical engine,and a dictionary, upon which a series of application engines rely. Theapplications are a chunker, a tagger, and a device that recognizes thestructure in structured text. FIG. 18 shows the relationships betweenthese layers.

One purpose of the base N-Gram Analyzer component 1800 is to contributeto the discovery of the structure in structured text. That structureappears on multiple levels, and each layer of the architecture works ona different level. The levels from the bottom up are “words”, “terms”,“usage”, and “dimensions of schema”. The following example shows thestructure of a typical product description.

acetone amber glass bottle, assay>99.5% color (alpha)<11

The word-level of structure is a list of the tokens in the order oftheir appearance. The word “acetone” is first, then the word “amber”,and so forth.

The terminology-level of structure is a list of the groups of words thatact like a single word. Another way of describing terminology is to saythat a group of words is a term when it names a standard concept for thepeople who work in the subject matter. In the example, “acetone”, “amberglass”, and “color (alpha)” are probably terms.

The next two levels of structure connect the words and terms to the goalof understanding the product description. The SOLx system approximatesthat goal with a schema for understanding. When the SOLx system operateson product description texts, the schema has a simple form that repeatsacross many kinds of products. The schema for product descriptions lookslike a table.

Quantity/ Product Where Used Color Package . . . pliers non sterileblack 1 . . . forceps sterile silver 6 . . . paint exterior red 1 . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Each column of the table is a property that characterizes a product.Each row of the table is a different product. In the cells of the roware the particular values of each property for that product. Differentcolumns may be possible for different kinds of products. This reportrefers to the columns as “dimensions” of the schema. For other subjectmatter, the schema may have other forms. This fragment does not considerthose other forms.

Returning to the example, the next level of structure is the usagelevel. That level classifies each word or term according to thedimension of the schema that it can describe. In the example, “acetone”is a “chemical”; “amber glass” is a material; “bottle” is a “product”;and so forth. The following tagged text shows the usage level ofstructure of the example in detail.

[chemical](acetone) [material](amber glass) [product](bottle) [,](,)[measurement](assay) [>](>) [number](99) [.](.) [number](5)[unit_of_measure](%) [measurement](color (alpha)) [<](<) [number](11)The top level of structure that SOLx considers for translation consistsof the dimensions of the schema. At that level, grammatical sequences ofwords describe features of the product in some dimensions that arerelevant to that product. In the example, “acetone” describes thedimension “product”; “amber glass bottle” describes a “container ofproduct”; and so forth. The following doubly tagged text shows thedimension-level of structure for the example, without identifying thedimensions.

 [schema]([chemical](acetone) ) [schema]([material](amber glass)[product](bottle) [,](,) ) [schema]([measurement](assay) [>](>)[number](99) [.](.[) [number](5) [unit_of_measure](%) )[schema]([measurement](color (alpha)) [<](<) [number](11))Given the structure above, it is possible to insert commas into theoriginal text of the example, making it more readable. The followingtext shows the example with commas inserted.

acetone, amber glass bottle, assay>99.5%, color (alpha)<11

This model of the structure of text makes it possible to translate moreaccurately.

The discovery of structure by N-Gram Analysis is parallel to thediscovery of structure by parsing in the Natural Language Engine. Thetwo components are complementary, because each can serve where the otheris weak. For example, in the example above, the NLE parser coulddiscover the structure of the decimal number, “[number](99.5)”, savingNGA the task of modeling the grammar of decimal fractions. Thestatistical model of grammar in NGA can make it unnecessary for humanexperts to write extensive grammars for NLE to extract a diverselarger-scale grammar. By balancing the expenditure of effort in NGA andNLE, people can minimize the work necessary to analyze the structure oftexts.

One of the basic parts of the NGA component 1800 is a statisticalmodeler, which provides the name for the whole component. Thestatistical idea is to count the sequences of words in a body of text inorder to measure the odds that a particular word appears after aparticular sequence. In mathematical terms, the statistical modelercomputes the conditional probability of word n, given words 1 throughn−1: P(w_(n)|w₁, . . . , w_(n-1)).

Using that statistical information about a body of text, it is possibleto make reasonable guesses about the structure of text. The firstapproximation of a reasonable guess is to assume that the most likelystructure is also the structure that the author of the text intended.That assumption is easily incorrect, given the variety of human authors,but it is a good starting place for further improvement.

The next improvement toward recognizing the intent of the author is toadd some specific information about the subject matter. The dictionarycomponent 1802 captures that kind of information at the levels of words,terms, and usage. Two sources may provide that information. First, ahuman expert could add words and terms to the dictionary, indicatingtheir usage. Second, the NLE component could tag the text, using itsgrammar rules, and the NGA component adds the phrases inside the tags tothe dictionary, using the name of the tag to indicate the usage.

The information in the dictionary complements the information in thestatistical model by providing a better interpretation of text when thestatistical assumption is inappropriate. The statistical model acts as afallback analysis when the dictionary does not contain information aboutparticular words and phrases.

The chunker 1804 combines the information in the dictionary 1802 and theinformation in the statistical model to partition a body of texts intophrases. Partitioning is an approximation of parsing that sacrificessome of the details of parsing in order to execute without the grammarrules that parsing requires. The chunker 1804 attempts to optimize thepartitions so each cell is likely to contain a useful phrase. One partof that optimization uses the dictionary to identify function words andexcludes phrases that would cut off grammatical structures that involvethe function words.

The chunker can detect new terms for the dictionary in the form of cellsof partitions that contain phrases that are not already in thedictionary. The output of the chunker is a list of cells that it used topartition the body of text.

The tagger 1806 is an enhanced form of the chunker that reports thepartitions instead of the cells in the partitions. When a phrase in acell of a partition appears in the dictionary, and the dictionary entryhas the usage of the phrase, the tagger prints the phrase with the usagefor a tag. Otherwise, the tagger prints the phrase without a tag. Theresult is text tagged with the usage of the phrases.

The structurer 1808 uses the statistical modeler to determine how todivide the text into dimensions of the schema, without requiring aperson to write grammar rules. The training data for the structurer'sstatistical model is a set of tagged texts with explicit “walls” betweenthe dimensions of the schema. The structurer trains by using the N-GramAnalyzer 1800 to compute the conditional probabilities of the walls inthe training data. The structurer 1808 operates by first tagging a bodyof text and then placing walls into the tagged text where they are mostprobable.

Referring again to FIG. 17, the candidate heuristics are a series ofknowledge bases, much like pre-defined templates that kick-start thenormalization process. They are intended to address pieces of contentthat pervade user content. Items such as units of measure, powerconsumption, colors, capacities, etc. will be developed and semanticcategories 1724 are developed.

The spell checker 1726 is a conventional module added to SOLx toincrease the effectiveness of the normalization.

The Grammar & Rules Editor (GRE) 1728 is a text-editing environment thatuses many Unix like tools for creation of rules and grammars fordescribing the content. It can always be used in a “fall-back”situation, but will rarely be necessary when the GUI 1716 is available.

The Taxonomy, Schemas, & Grammar Rules module 1730 is the output fromeither the GRE 1728 or the GUI 1716. It consists of a set of ASCII filesthat are the input into the natural language parsing engine (NLE) 1718.

On initialization, the NLE 1718 reads a set of grammar and normalizationrules from the file system or some other persistent storage medium andcompiles them into a set of Rule objects employed by the runtimetokenizer and parser and a set of NormRule objects employed by thenormalizer. Once initialized the NLE 1718 will parse and normalize inputtext one line at a time or may instead process a text input file inbatch mode, generating a text output file in the desired form.

Configuration and initialization generally requires that a configurationfile be specified. The configuration file enumerates the contents of theNLE knowledge base, providing a list of all files containing format,grammar, and normalization rules.

NLE 1718 works in three steps: tokenization, parsing, and normalization.First, the input text is tokenized into one or more candidate tokensequences. Tokenization is based on what sequences of tokens may occurin any top-level phrase parsed by the grammar. Tokens must be delineatedby white space unless one or more of such tokens are represented asregular expressions in the grammar, in which case the tokens may becontiguous, undelineated by white space. Tokenization may yieldambiguous results, i.e., identical strings that may be parsed by morethan one grammar rule. The parser resolves such ambiguities.

The parser is a modified top-down chart parser. Standard chart parsersassume that the input text is already tokenized, scanning the string oftokens and classify each according to its part-of-speech or semanticcategory. This parser omits the scanning operation, replacing it withthe prior tokenization step. Like other chart parsers, it recursivelypredicts those constituents and child constituents that may occur perthe grammar rules and tries to match such constituents against tokensthat have been extracted from the input string. Unlike the prototypicalchart parser, it is unconstrained where phrases may begin and end, howoften they may occur in an input string, or some of the input text mightbe unable to be parsed. It generates all possible parses that occur,starting at any arbitrary white space delineated point in the inputtext, and compares all possible parse sequences, selecting the bestscoring alternative and generating a parse tree for each. If more thanone parse sequence achieves the best score, both parse trees areextracted from the chart and retained. Others are ignored.

Output of the chart parser and the scoring algorithm is the set ofalternative high scoring parse trees. Each parse tree object includesmethods for transforming itself according to a knowledge base ofnormalization rules. Each parse tree object may also emit a Stringcorresponding to text contained by the parse tree or such a Stringtogether with a string tag. Most such transformation or emission methodstraverse the parse tree in post-order, being applied to a parse tree'schildren first, then being applied to the tree itself. For example, atoString( ) method collects the results of toString( ) for each childand only then concatenates them, returning the parse tree's Stringrepresentation. Thus, normalization and output is accomplished as a setof traversal methods inherent in each parse tree. Normalization includesparse tree transformation and traversal methods for replacing orreordering children (rewrite rules), for unconditional or lookup tablebased text replacement, for decimal punctuation changes, for joiningconstituents together with specified delimiters or without white space,and for changing tag labels.

The Trial Parsed Content 1734 is a set of test samples of either taggedor untagged normalized content. This sample corresponds to a set ofrules and grammars that have been parsed. Trial parsed content is theoutput of a statistical sample of the original input data. When asequence of content samples parses to a constant level of unparsedinput, then the set if grammars and rules are likely to be sufficientlycomplete that the entire data may be successfully parsed with a minimumof ambiguities and unparsed components. It is part of the interactiveprocess to build grammars and rules for the normalization of content.

A complete tested grammar and rule set 1736 corresponding to the fullunambiguous tagging of content is the goal of the normalization process.It insures that all ambiguous terms or phrases such as Mil that could beeither a trade name abbreviation for Milwaukee or an abbreviation forMilitary have been defined in a larger context. This set 1736 is thengiven as input to the NLE Parsing Engine 1738 that computes the finalnormalized content, and is listed in the figure as Taxonomy TaggedNormalized Content 1732.

The custom translation dictionary 1740 is a collection of words andphrases that are first identified through the grammar rule creationprocess and passed to an external technical translator. This content isreturned and is entered into one of the custom dictionaries associatedwith the machine translation process. There are standard formats thattranslators typically use for sending translated content.

The MTS 1742 may be any of various conventional machine translationproducts that given a set of custom dictionaries as well as its standardones, a string of text in one language, produces a string of test in thedesired language. Current languages supported by one such product markedunder the name SYSTRAN include: French, Portuguese, English, German,Greek, Spanish, Italian, simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.Output from the MTS is a Translated Content file 1744.

The one purpose of the Machine Translation Server 1742 is to translatestructured texts, such as product descriptions. The state of the art incommercial machine translation is too weak for many practicalapplications. The MTS component 1742 increases the number ofapplications of machine translation by wrapping a standard machinetranslation product in a process that simplifies its task. Thesimplification that MTS provides comes from its ability to recognize thestructure of texts to be translated. The MTS decomposes the text to betranslated into its structural constituents, and then applies machinetranslation to the constituents, where the translation problem issimpler. This approach sacrifices the fidelity of references betweenconstituents in order to translate the individual constituentscorrectly. For example, adjective inflections could disagree with thegender of their objects, if they occur in different constituents. Thecompromise results in adequate quality for many new applications inelectronic commerce. Future releases of the software will address thisissue, because the compromise is driven by expedience.

The conditioning component of MTS 1742 uses the NGA component torecognize the structure of each text to be translated. It prepares thetexts for translation in a way that exploits the ability of the machinetranslation system to operate on batches of texts. For example, SYSTRANcan interpret lists of texts delimited by new-lines, given a parameterstating that the document it receives is a parts list. Within each lineof text, SYSTRAN can often translate independently between commas, sothe conditioning component inserts commas between dimensions of theschema if they are not already present. The conditioning component maycompletely withhold a dimension from machine translation, if it has acomplete translation of that dimension in its dictionary.

The machine translation component provides a consistent interface for avariety of machine translation software products, in order to allowcoverage of language pairs.

The repair component is a simple automated text editor that removesunnecessary words, such as articles, from SYSTRAN's Spanish translationsof product descriptions. In general, this component will correct forsmall-scale stylistic variations among machine translation tools.

The Translation Quality Estimation Analyzer (TQA) 1746 merges thestructural information from conditioning with the translations fromrepair, producing a list of translation pairs. If any phrases bypassedmachine translation, this merging process gets their translations fromthe dictionary.

After merging, translation quality estimation places each translationpair into one of three categories. The “good” category contains pairswhose source and target texts have acceptable grammar, and the contentof the source and target texts agrees. A pair in the “bad” category hasa source text with recognizable grammar, but its target grammar isunacceptable or the content of the source text disagrees with thecontent of the target text. The “ugly” category contains pairs whosesource grammar is unfamiliar.

The feedback loop extracts linguistic knowledge from a person. Theperson examines the “bad” and “ugly” pairs and takes one of thefollowing actions. The person may define words and terms in thedictionary, indicating their usage. The person may define grammar rulesfor the NLE component in order to tag some part of the text. The personmay correct the translation pair (if it requires correction), and placeit into the set of examples for training the translation qualityestimation models. The person may take the source text, mark it withwalls between dimensions of the schema, and place it into the set ofexamples for training the structure model. An appropriate graphical userinterface will make the first and last actions implicit in the thirdaction, so a person will only have to decide whether to write grammarsor to correct examples.

The translation quality estimation component uses two models from theN-Gram Analyzer that represent the grammar of the source and targettexts. The translation quality estimation component also uses a contentmodel that is partially statistical and partially the dictionary. Thetwo parts overlap in their ability to represent the correspondence incontent between source and target texts. The dictionary can representexact correspondences between words and terms. The statistical model canrecognize words that occur in one language, but are unnecessary in theother, and other inexact correspondences.

It is well known that the accuracy of machine translations based onstandard glossaries are only sufficient to get the gist of thetranslation. There are no metrics associated with the level of accuracyof any particular translation. The TQA 1746 attempts to define a measureof accuracy for any single translation. The basis for the accuracyestimate is a statistical overlap between the translated content at theindividual phrase level, and prior translations that have been manuallyevaluated.

The Normalized Content 1748 and/or Translated Content 1706 can next becached in the Normalized Content Server and Localized Content Server(LCS) 1752, respectively. This cached data is made available through theSOLx Server 1708.

The LCS 1752 is a fast lookup translation cache. There are two parts tothe LCS 1752: an API that is called by Java clients (such as a JSPserver process) to retrieve translations, and an user interface 1754that allows the user 1756 to manage and maintain translations in the LCSdatabase 1752.

As well as being the translation memory foundation of the SOLx system1700, the LCS 1752 is also intended to be used as a standalone productthat can be integrated into legacy customer servers to providetranslation lookups.

The LCS 1752 takes as input source language text, the source locale, andthe target locale. The output from LCS 1752 is the target text, ifavailable in the cache, which represents the translation from the sourcetext and source locale, into the target locale. The LCS 1752 is loadedahead of run-time with translations produced by the SOLx system 1700.The cache is stored in a relational database.

The SOLx Server 1708 provides the customer with a mechanism for run-timeaccess to the previously cached, normalized and translated data. TheSOLx Server 1708 also uses a pipeline processing mechanism that not onlypermits access to the cached data, but also allows true on-the-flyprocessing of previously unprocessed content. When the SOLx Serverencounters content that has not been cached, it then performs thenormalization and/or translation on the fly. The existing knowledge baseof the content structure and vocabulary is used to do the on-the-flyprocessing.

Additionally, the NCS and LCS user interface 1754 provides a way forSMEs 1756 to search and use normalized 1748 and translated 1706 data.The NCS and LCS data is tied back to the original ERP information viathe customer's external key information, typically an item part number.

As shown in FIG. 1700, the primary NorTran Workbench engines are alsoused in the SOLx Server 1708. These include: N-Gram Analyzer 1722,Machine Translation Server 1742, Natural Language Engine 1718, CandidateSearch Engine 1720, and Translation Quality Analyzer 1746. The SOLxserver 1708 also uses the grammar rules 1754 and custom and standardglossaries 1756 from the Workbench 1702. Integration of the SOLx server1708 for managing communication between the source/legacy system 1712and targets via the Web 1758 is managed by an integration server 1758and a workflow control system 1760.

FIG. 21 is a flowchart illustrating a process 2100 for searching adatabase or network using normalization and classification as discussedabove. The process 2100 is initiated by establishing (2102) a taxonomyand establishing (2104) normalization rules as discussed above. Forexample, the taxonomy may define a subject matter area in the case of aspecialized search engine or a substantial portion of a language for amore generalized tool. Once the taxonomy and normalization rules havebeen initially established, a query is received (2106) and parsed (2108)into chunks. The chunks are then normalized (2110) and classified (2112)using the normalization rules and taxonomy. The classificationinformation may be associated with the chunks via tags, e.g., XML tags.

At this point, the normalized chunks may be translated (2114 a-c) tofacilitate multi-language searching. The process for translating isdescribed in more detail below. One or more research engines are thenused (2116 a-c) to perform term searches using the normalized chunks andthe classification information. Preferably, documents that are searchedhave also been processed using compatible normalization rules and acorresponding taxonomy as discussed above such that responsive documentscan be retrieved based on a term match and/or a tag match. However, theillustrated process 2100 may be advantageously used even in connectionwith searching unprocessed documents, e.g., by using the normalizedchunks and/or terms associated with the classification to perform aconventional term search. The responsive documents may then benormalized and classified (2118 a-c) and translated (2120 a-c) asdescribed in more detail below. Finally, the search results are compiled(2122) for presentation to the searcher. It will be appreciated thatnormalization and classification of the search query thus facilitatesmore structured searching of information in a database or networkincluding in a multi-language environment. Normalization andclassification also assist in translation by reducing the quantity ofterms required to be translated and by using the classificationstructure to reduce ambiguities.

III. Information Sharing

As will be appreciated from the discussion above, preparing thetransformation system for a particular application involves significanteffort by one or more human operators or SMEs. Such effort relates,inter alia, to mapping of source collection terms to a standardizedterminology, associating terms with a classification system or taxonomy,e.g., as reflected in a tag structure, and establishing syntax rules.This is accomplished with the assistance of a tool denoted the KnowledgeBuilder tool below.

Even with the assistance of the Knowledge Builder tool, this preparationprocess can be time consuming and cumbersome. It is therefore desirableto allow for reuse of pre-existing information, for example, previouslydeveloped mapping rules for mapping source collection terms tostandardized terminology or previously developed classificationstructure or taxonomy. Such sharing of information may be used toprovide a head-start in connection with a new knowledge base creationproject, to accommodate multiple users or SMEs working on the samesubject area or domain (including at the same time) or in various otherinformation sharing contexts. The invention is described below inconnection with supporting multiple SMEs developing a SMM that involvesworking in the same domains or at least one common domain. While thisexample aptly illustrates the information sharing functionality, it willbe appreciated that the invention is not limited to this context.

Two issues that are addressed by the Knowledge Builder tool inconnection with sharing information are: 1) using or importing onlyselected information, as may be desired, rather than being limited tousing or importing a full knowledge base; and 2) resolving potentialconflicts or inconsistencies resulting from multiple users working in asingle domain. By addressing these issues as discussed below, benefitsof information sharing can be efficiently realized.

A. Domain Management

FIG. 22 generally illustrates an architecture for an information sharingenvironment involving multiple SMEs. For purposes of illustration, thisis shown as involving a server-client model involving server 2200 andclients 2202-2204. As will be described in more detail below, certainknowledge base development functionality including information sharingfunctionality is executed by a Knowledge Builder tool 2206. In theillustrated embodiment, the functionality of this tool is illustrated asbeing distributed over the server 2200 and client 2202-2204 platforms,however, it will be appreciated that other hardware implementations arepossible.

The SMEs use graphical interfaces 2208 at the clients 2202-2204, in theillustrated embodiment, to access a project database 2210 and adeveloping knowledge base 2212, each of which is schematicallyillustrated, in this example, as residing at the server 2202. Theproject database 2210 may include, for example, the collection of sourcedata that is to be transformed. The knowledge base 2212 includesclassification or taxonomy structure, rules and the like, that have beendeveloped by the SMEs or others. The illustrated clients 2202-2204 alsoinclude storage 2214, for storing rules and the like under development,or to temporarily store a version of the knowledge base or portionsthereof, as will be described in more detail below.

The Knowledge Builder tool includes a Domain Management module toaddress the issue of using or importing only selected information. TheDomain Management module segments the various rules in the developingknowledge base into smaller, easily managed compartments. Morespecifically, the knowledge base may be graphically represented in thefamiliar form of files and folders.

This is illustrated in FIG. 23. In the illustrated example, a newknowledge base project is started with at least two domain folders asshown in panel 2300 of a graphical user interface. Specifically, theknowledge base includes a default domain folder and the common folder2302. The default domain folder includes phrases and terms that have notbeen assigned to other domain folders.

These phrases and terms appear in the knowledge base tree 2304 under thenodes labeled “Phrase Structure” 2306 and “Terminology” 2308 directlyunder the “Knowledge Base” node 2310. Initially, the common folder doesnot contain any phrases or terms.

The Knowledge Builder tool attempts to automatically place the rulesinto the appropriate domain folder when they are created. If a domainhas not been specified, all created rules are placed in the phrasestructure or terminology folders 2306 or 2308 under the knowledge basenode 2310. When a new domain is created, the Knowledge Builder toolcontinues to place rules in the phrase structure or terminology folders2306 or 2308 until the user manually drags the rules into the newdomain. Thereafter, when new rules are created, the Knowledge Buildertool analyzes the new rules to determine whether the new rules arerelated to the rules in the new folder. If so, the tool willautomatically place the newly created rules in the same folder. Suchanalysis may involve consideration of the associated terminology or anyidentification of a classification or other taxonomical structure, forexample, dependencies and references as described below.

Domains can be nested to any level. When a domain is created theKnowledge Builder tool automatically creates a common folder at the samelevel. Whenever a subdomain is created the system creates a sub commonfolder that is initially empty. If an additional subdomain is createdand populated with rules, the Knowledge Builder tool will automaticallymove rules common to the two subdomains into the sub common. The toolmoves rules into and out of common domains as additional rules arecreated and depending on where they are positioned within the domainhierarchy.

The user can also move phrase rules from one domain to another. Asphrases are moved into a domain, related phrases and terminal rules arealso moved either into the same domain or into the appropriate commondomain. For improved efficiency, top-level phrased rules can be movedthereby implicitly dragging related phrase and terminal rules into adomain.

A user can also move domain folders into other domains. When a domainfolder is moved, all of the associated rules are also moved. This canalso create additional common folders. As noted above, informationsharing can facilitate creation of new knowledge bases. In this regard,when a new project is created, the user can select a single domain froman existing project to import into the new project. Multiple domains canbe imported in this manner with any resulting inconsistencies addressedas discussed below.

1. Domain Creation

A fundamental step in the process of knowledge base development isdomain creation. Domain creation can be accomplished using the KnowledgeBuilder tool. In this regard, FIG. 24 illustrates a graphical userinterface 2400 that may be displayed upon launching the KnowledgeBuilder tool. The graphical user interface 2400 generally includes aknowledge base structure or classification panel 2402, a sourcecollection or project panel 2404, and a taxonomy or parse tree panel2406. The interoperation of these panels is described below.

To create a domain, the user can right-click on the knowledge base node2408 of the knowledge base panel 2402. This causes a pop-up window 2500to be displayed as shown in FIG. 25. From the pop-up window 2500, theuser selects the create subdomain entry 2502. The user is then promptedto name this first domain as shown in FIG. 26. In the illustratedexample, the new domain is named “passives.” As shown in FIG. 27, theknowledge base panel 2700 is then updated to include a folder icon 2702for the “passives” domain.

2. Domain Editing

A variety of domain editing functions are supported by the KnowledgeBuilder tool including functionality for moving rules, renaming domainsand deleting domains. In the example discussed above, rules may be movedinto the passives domain after that domain is established. For example,rules may be dragged from their current location in the knowledge basepanel to the desired domain folder. Alternatively, rules can be draggedinto domain folders using a move rules dialog. To open the move rulesdialog, the edit/move rules menu (not shown) is selected and the rule isdragged from the knowledge base tree onto the desire domain in theresulting dialog. The advantage of using the move rules dialog isminimizing scrolling through the knowledge base tree.

Domains may be renamed by selecting the appropriate domain,right-clicking and selecting the rename domain menu item. A domain namedialog is then opened as shown above and can be used to enter the newname.

Domains may be deleted by selecting the appropriate domain,right-clicking and selecting the delete domain menu item. It should benoted that the associated rules are not deleted. They move to the nextlevel in the knowledge base tree. This may involve moving rules to otherdomains, other common folders or root folders. In the illustratedimplementation, it is not possible to simultaneously delete domains andassociated rules by deleting only the domain (though such functionalitycould optionally be supported). Individual rules are deleted eitherbefore or after the domain itself is deleted.

3. Domain Reuse

As noted above, one of the advantages of domains is that they may beimported into a new project without importing the entire prior project.This allows for more efficient reuse of knowledge previously created. Toimport a domain from an existing project, the file/input domain's menuitem is selected. This opens an import domain's dialog box 2800 as shownin FIG. 28. A pull-down menu 2802 can then be utilized to select theproject from which the user wishes to import a domain. Panel 2804 of thedialog box 2800 displays the knowledge base tree from the selectedproject. The desired domain can then be dragged to the target positionand the knowledge base tree of knowledge base panel 2900 as shown inFIG. 29.

B. Multi-User Functionality

The discussion above described how domains can be created, populated andedited. These same processes may be used by multiple SMEs to jointlydevelop a knowledge base. For example, the developing database may beaccessed on a server by multiple SMEs at different workstations via aLAN, WAN or the like. Each of the SMEs may import particular domains onwhich to work. In order to accommodate such multi-user development, itis useful to provide a mechanism for resolving conflicts or ambiguities.Such conflicts or ambiguities may result from inconsistent mapping ofterms, inconsistent rule definitions or the like, which may beidentified based on dependency and reference relationships as describedbelow.

There are a number of ways that such conflicts and ambiguities can beavoided or resolved. For example, when one SME selects a domain forediting or extension, other SMEs may be locked out of that domain so asto substantially avoid conflicts and inconsistencies. Such animplementation may be practical in the context of the present inventionbecause the knowledge base is divided into multiple domains, thusallowing for concurrent access to selected portions of the knowledgebase. However, it is often desirable to allow multiple SMEs toconcurrently work on the same domain, e.g., to more rapidly process alarge volume of data.

Many architectures are possible for resolving conflicts or ambiguitiesin the case of multiple SMEs working on a single domain. For example,one definitive version of the domain may be retained, for example, atthe server. Each SME may then “check-out” a version of the domain forrevision and extension. When a version of the domain is checked back-in,the revisions and extensions may be analyzed relative to pre-definedrules. Thus, the rules may cause the Knowledge Builder tool to acceptrevisions and extensions that do not result in conflicts relative to thedefinitive version and reject all other revisions or extensions.Alternatively, revisions and extensions that result in conflicts orinconsistencies may be identified so that they can be resolved by anauthorized SME, e.g., by selecting one of the conflicting rules andediting the other to be replaced by or consistent therewith. Similarly,upon importing a domain, all conflicts or inconsistencies may be listedor highlighted for arbitration.

Alternatively, one of the SMEs may be designated as dominant withrespect to a particular project, such that his revisions and extensionsare accepted as definitive. Revisions and extensions by other,subservient SMEs would then be rejected or harmonized with the knowledgebase of the dominant SME by arbitration rules as discussed above.Further, rather than checking-out and checking back-in domain versionsas discussed above, arbitration can be executed in real time asknowledge base development is occurring. For example, if an SME proposesthat the term “mil” be rewritten as “milliliter” and a rule alreadyexists (in the same domain or anywhere within the knowledge base,depending on the specific implementation) that requires “mil” to berewritten as “Milwaukee,” the SME may be immediately notified by way ofan error message upon entry of the proposed rule.

Regardless of the specific architecture employed, the Knowledge Buildertool executes logic for identifying or preventing conflicts andinconsistencies. This may be based on dependencies and references. Arule dependency is a relationship between two rules. The dependency is asecond rule that must be defined in order for the first rule to bevalid. Only phrase structure rules have dependencies. A first structurerule's dependency set is that set of rules that appear as constituentsin its productions.

Those dependencies are apparent by inspecting a parse tree of theknowledge base panel. Thus, the rule corresponding to a parent node in aparse tree is said to depend on any rule corresponding to child nodes.In the example of FIG. 30, [attr_resistance] has dependencies on[number] and [ohm], and [number] has at least a dependency on [period]that is apparent in this particular parse tree. Other parse trees mayreveal other [number] dependencies, e.g., [integer] and [fraction].

It will be appreciated that one may not be able to see all dependenciesin a single parse tree. A phrase structure rule's productions define allpossible dependencies. Thus, one can manually edit a rule to view alldependencies. In the example of FIG. 31, [sae_thread_size] hasdependencies on [screw_dimension], [thread_dia], [real], [separator_-],[separator_pound] and [separator_colon].

References are the inverse of dependencies. A reference is one ofpossibly several rules that depends on the current rule. In the exampleabove, rules [screw_dimension], [thread_dia], [real], [separator_-],[separator_pound] and [separator_colon] are each referenced by[sae_thread_size], although each may be referenced by other rules, too.

One would have to inspect the entire grammar to determine allreferences, so the Knowledge Builder tool provides a utility to get alist of references for any rule. The utility is accessed byright-clicking on any rule in the knowledge tree. A menu is thendisplayed that includes the entry “get references.” By selecting the“get references” item, a display is provided as shown in FIG. 32.

In general, terminology rules do not have dependencies although any oneterminology rule may have many references.

The rules that govern legal dependencies among the domains are aimed atkeeping knowledge contained in each domain as self sufficient aspossible. An exception is that knowledge that is shared among multipledomains is stored in a Common domain. There may be several Commondomains in a single project. A Common domain is automatically added to adomain when a child domain is created there.

A grammar rule that resides in some domain may have dependencies on anyof the following objects: any rule that resides in the same domain; anyrule that resides in a child or descendant domain; and any rule thatresides in a Common domain that is a child of a parent or ancestordomain. Thus, the scope of a domain is limited to that domain, any childor descendant domain, and any Common domain that is the child of aparent or ancestor domain.

Referring to FIG. 33, any rule in FactoryEquipmentandsupplies may havedependencies on all rules in adhesives_and_sealants, chemicals, Common,engines_and_motors, and any other of its subdomains, because they areall children and in the top level Common. On the other hand, a rule inFactoryEquipment_and_supplies may not have dependencies on any rules inComputerEquipment_and_supplies hardware, or other siblings. Nor may itreference rules at the root level in the “phrase structure” and“terminology” folders immediately under the “knowledge base” node.Likewise, “chemicals” may not have dependencies on “tools,” “hardware,”or the root domain, but rules in “chemicals” may reference the factoryequipment Common and the root Common.

Thus, the assignment of a rule to a domain and other operations ondomains are governed by dependencies among rules. Whether an operationis legal is governed by such dependencies and automatic assignments aregoverned by such dependencies. Dependencies among rules are used togovern domain operations in order to preserve a grammar consistency andto enable the use of domains as containers for moving knowledge from oneproject to another. Any branch in a domain hierarchy, if copied to a newproject, should act as consistent and correct grammar. As a result,consistency is constantly maintained by inspecting dependencies amongrules when rules or domains are moved or when new productions and newrules are introduced or when existing rules are edited manually.

This is illustrated by the example of FIG. 34. FIG. 34 generallyillustrates a grammar. If a user creates a new domain“PassiveElectronics” and new subdomains “resistors” and “capacitors”under it, a new Common will automatically be inserted under“PassiveElectronics.”

In the illustrated example, the rule [resistor] has no dependencies. Ifone drags it to “resistors,” no other rules will move there. However, ifthe user was to drag [product_resistor] to “resistors,” more than halfthe rules in the grammar will be automatically moved there, including[res_type], [variable], [carbon_film], [resistance], [number], and[ohms] and any other direct or indirect dependency.

Now, if the user moves [capacitor] to “capacitors,” only the one rulemoves. If, instead, the rule [product_capacitor] is moved, all theremaining rules move to “capacitors” too. However, several other rulesare moved to PassiveElectronics: Common. Those are the rules that arereferenced, either directly or indirectly by rules inresistors_and_capacitors, including [variable], [number], [tolerance],and [percent], all which have first been moved to “resistors.”

Now consider the grammar rules illustrated in FIG. 35. The user mayinsert a new domain at the root called “hardware” and then drag [screwvariety] into the new domain. All of the new rules are automaticallyassigned to “hardware.” But [number], previously assigned toPassiveElectronics: Common, is now moved instead to Common under theroot. This is because the root is the only ancestor common to“hardware,” “resistors” and “capacitors,” and [number], which hasreferences in all three domains and may only be assigned to the Commonunder the root.

Thus, the Knowledge Builder tool uses dependencies and references for avariety of purposes including governing whether an operation is legal.

FIG. 36 is a flow chart illustrating a process 3600 for augmenting agrammar from component domains. The process 3600 is initiated by opening3602 the current project and knowledge base. The current projectincludes a source listing that is to be transformed. The user then tests3604 the current project using the current knowledge base and saves theresult for regression testing. Next, the user augments 3606 theknowledge base from a grammar in an external project, as describedabove. In this regard, the user may drag 3608 one or more domains fromthe external project into the current project. The Knowledge Buildertool then checks for inconsistencies and conflicts, for example, basedon the dependency and reference listings. Each inconsistency andconflict is identified to the user who responds to each, for example, byharmonizing such inconsistencies and conflicts. The user can then retest3610 the project using the modified knowledge base and run a furtherregression test with the previously saved data. The user then judges3612 the result to determine whether the original knowledge base or themodified knowledge base is more effective. The Knowledge Builder toolmay also analyze the regression test to identify the sources ofprogressions and regressions so as to facilitate trouble shooting.

The present invention thus allows for knowledge sharing for a variety ofpurposes including facilitating the processing of developing a newknowledge base and allowing multiple users to work on a single project,including simultaneous development involving a common domain. In thismanner, the process for developing a knowledge base is significantlystreamlined.

While various embodiments of the present invention have been describedin detail, it is apparent that further modifications and adaptations ofthe invention will occur to those skilled in the art. However, it is tobe expressly understood that such modifications and adaptations arewithin the spirit and scope of the present invention.

What is claimed is:
 1. A method for use in searching stored information,comprising the following steps of: establishing a knowledge base for agiven subject matter area, wherein an association is defined betweenpotential search terms for search requests and source terms identifyingsource data of the subject matter area based on a common classificationof the potential search terms and the source terms identifying thesubject matter area, thereby establishing a context for matching thepotential search terms and the source terms in relation to the subjectmatter area; receiving a search request including a first search term;determining that the first search term matches at least one of thepotential search terms; in response to the determining, using theknowledge base to search the stored information to retrieve resultinformation that is responsive to the search request by: identifying afirst source term within the knowledge base, different from the firstsearch term with respect to one of linguistics and syntax, identifying afirst classification of a subject matter area associated with the firstsource term and a second classification that is a sub-classification ofthe first classification of the subject matter area associated with thefirst source term, and searching the stored information based on boththe first classification and the second classification, wherein thesearch based on the first classification being: automatically conductedafter the search based on the second classification, and based on aresult of the search based on the second classification, wherein thesearch based on the first classification is only conducted in responseto a failure to obtain any result information from the search based onthe second classification; and responding to the search request usingthe result information.
 2. The method as set forth in claim 1, whereinthe step of establishing comprises using a subject matter expert toestablish associations for particular products in a product field of theknowledge base.
 3. The method as set forth in claim 1, wherein the stepof establishing comprises establishing an association between multipleproducts based on an equivalency of the multiple products.
 4. The methodas set forth in claim 1, wherein the step of establishing comprisesassociating individual products with a defined product category.
 5. Themethod as set forth in claim 1, wherein the step of establishing theknowledge base comprises obtaining a list of the potential search termsand transforming the potential search terms of the list from a firstform to a second form, where the second form differs from the first formwith respect to one of the linguistics and syntax.
 6. The method as setforth in claim 5, wherein the transforming comprises translating thepotential search terms from a first language to a second language. 7.The method as set forth in claim 1, wherein the step of establishing theknowledge base comprises obtaining a list of the source terms andtransforming the source terms of the list from a first form to a secondform, where the second form differs from the first form with respect toone of the linguistics and syntax.
 8. The method as set forth in claim7, wherein the transforming comprises translating the source terms froma first language to a second language.
 9. The method as set forth inclaim 1, wherein the step of responding comprises prioritizing items ofthe result information for presentation based on a relevance relatedcriterion.
 10. The method as set forth in claim 9, wherein the criterionrelates to a classification level by which respective ones of the itemswere identified in searching the stored information.